Who Owns Scotland, again?

Swathes of Scotland are owned by secretive companies registered in tax haven Panama. Thousands of acres of wilderness are controlled offshore, where the owners can avoid tax and scrutiny.

A Sunday Mail investigation uncovered 64,000 acres – equivalent to the size of Edinburgh. But experts believe 10 times as much land, which could be worth about £100million, is registered to businesses in tax havens including the British Virgin Islands and Grand Cayman.

Andy Wightman, a campaigner for land ownership reform and a Green Party candidate in Lothian, condemned the offshore ownership of Scotland and predicted more Scottish links will be revealed as more documents are released. He said: “The Panama Papers are a big data set, so I would hope it will help us find out some more about who is behind the ownership of Scottish land. We have never had this big a lid lifted on what goes on in tax havens. There will almost certainly be items of Scottish importance to come out from these leaked documents. It’s difficult to put an exact figure on the value of the land in question but we could be talking about £100million. There will be other properties that are registered in Panama that I have not identified – this is just the tip of the iceberg. Some of this will be involved in tax avoidance or evasion. There is no way that people go to those efforts to stash assets offshore purely because they don’t want their spouse knowing in case they get divorced, or they don’t want their neighbours knowing.

Wightman explains, “Ultimately, if anything happens on any parcel of land, that decision has to be consented to by the owner of the land. It’s in the public interest – for how we use all land for housing, industry and food growing – that those people should be known. There has to be a degree of accountability. That matters at a local level because people who want to consider land for housing come up against problems. There are bits of Scotland that have been offshore for the best part of 40 years and those bits of land have just stagnated. Nobody knows who owns them so they can’t take the initiative to do anything with them. There are big questions about transparency. We are entitled to know who has control over our country.”

Compania Financiera Waterville SA, are listed as the owners of three large estates in Perth. Dalnaspidal,Camusericht, and Corrievarkie total almost 30,000 acres. The company, based in El Dorado, Panama, are also the registered owners of Ben Alder lodge on the 27,000-acre Ben Alder estate in Inverness-shire. The director of the company is shrouded in secrecy. Another Panama company, listed as Chooky Corporation, own 4375-acre East Benula estate in Inverness-shire. And the Clova estate in Aberdeenshire is linked to Giant Properties Corporation, with a Panama post office box for law firm Quijano and Associates provided as their address.

Community Land Scotland chairman Lorne Macleod said: “We need as much transparency in land ownership in Scotland as possible.”

A 2014 report for the Scottish Government found 432 individuals own 50 per cent of rural Scotland.

Richard Scott, the Duke of Buccleuch, owns the largest chunk with his 241,887 acres, including Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfriesshire.

Businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed owns Balnagown Castle in Easter Ross along with 60,000 acres of surrounding land. He bought the property for £60,000 in 1972.

Sigrid Rausing, daughter of Swedish billionaire and Tetra Pak heir Hans, owns a 40,000-acre estate in the Monadhliath mountains in the Highlands. Her sister Lisbet owns 52,000 acres near Fort William, where she built a controversial six-storey granite lodge on the shores of Loch Ossian.