Far too often, the identities of the people who really own Scotland are hidden from view
The Panama Papers are revealing the dark secrets of how the global elite have managed to conceal their financial affairs from tax authorities, regulators and the public.
I look forward to scrutinising the data when it is made public next month.
In particular, I’ll be seeking answers to who is behind some 750,000 acres of Scotland that is owned in secrecy jurisdictions from
Land rights campaigner and Scottish Parliament candidate for the Scottish Green Party in Lothian
Panama to Grand Cayman. This includes areas of the Waterfront in Edinburgh, where large swathes of land owned in the British Virgin Islands lie vacant and abandoned after the financial crash, with none of the badly needed homes that were meant to have been built by now.
It also includes much of Charlotte Square in the capital’s New Town, hunting estates across the Highlands and the extensive holdings of Scotland’s aristocracy.
In all these cases, the real identities of those who control the ownership and use of land in Scotland is hidden from public view.
In recent years, everyone from the Qatari royal family to the king of Dubai, the sultan of Brunei and assorted Russian oligarchs have been linked to property interests in Scotland.
But we can’t know for sure if they are, because we have no legal right to access the corporate records of the British Virgin Islands and Guernsey.
Twenty years ago, the Inland Revenue conducted three investigations into
the tax affairs of then Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed.
One of these related to his Scottish estates, owned by a company called Board Societe Anonyme registered in Liechtenstein.
After the publication of my first book, Who Owns Scotland, in 1996, the tax authorities established their own Who Owns Scotland project to try to probe the tax affairs of at least 12 other offshore companies.
When the Scottish Parliament was established in 1999, I met then deputy first minister Jim Wallace to persuade him of the need for greater transparency on who owns Scotland –but nothing happened.
In 2012, I tried but failed to persuade Fergus Ewing MSP of the same case. Again nothing happened. It has only been after campaigns by the public during the passage this year of the Land Reform Bill that, eventually, there has been some very modest progress.
Meanwhile, the toxic and secretive Scottish limited partnerships are slowly emerging into the public eye following associations with banking collapses in Moldova and money laundering through Panamanian partners.
Next year, they will be under a duty to declare who controls them – but, like all such registers, there is no way to check that such declarations are truthful and such frauds will likely continue to be perpetrated through legal vehicles registered in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Scotland should be blazing a trail of openness and transparency that, even with limited powers, should include publishing data, highlighting abuses and making it illegal for any entity in the British Overseas Territories or Crown Dependencies to register title to land in Scotland.
Scotland can do so much more and in the next Parliament it must.