THE LAIRDS OF PANAMA
Ownership of thousands of acres of Scotland is hidden offshore in tax haven Panama, we reveal today.
Huge swathes of the country are registered to firms in Central America where the owners avoid tax and scrutiny.
We have uncovered land in Perthshire, Aberdeenshire and the Highlands registered in Panama but experts suspect ownership of hundreds of thousands of acres is hidden overseas.
They believe 10 times as much is registered to businesses in Panama and other tax havens including the British Virgin Islands and Grand Cayman.
They hope the release of the millions of files from legal firm Mossack Fonseca will expose Scotland’s offshore owners.
Yesterday, Andy Wightman, a campaigner for land reform, said: “This is just the tip of the iceberg. “
Huge 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.
We have found land in Perthshire, Aberdeenshire and the Highlands that is registered in Panama – and that’s likely to be just the tip of the iceberg.
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.
They believe the release of the millions of files from legal firm Mossack Fonseca will reveal Scotland’s offshore owners.
The Panama Papers have dominated headlines for six days after uncovering the huge scale of tax avoidance by tycoons, celebrities and politicians from around the globe. David Cameron is among those engulfed in the controversy after he was forced to admit once owning shares in his father Ian’s Blai rmore Investment Trust, despite the company never paying a penny to the British taxman.
Yesterday, 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.”
Talking about the land registered to Panama, he added: “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.
“The last time I looked in the land register there were more than 30. Also, the land register has only been around from 1981 and only about 28 per cent of Scotland’s land mass is on it.
“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.
“So a substantial part of this is to avoid tax and this obviously puts an increased tax burden on everybody in Scotland.”
Wightman, the author of Who Owns Scotland and The Poor Had No Lawyers, added: “Aside from that, the people who own land make decisions.
“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.
“Historically, this has been resisted. I’ve been arguing for this for 25 years and we are still not much further forward.”
One company, named as Compania
it’s in the public interest that the owners of this land should be known
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.
The Scottish land register shows a total consideration for the various plots of land of about £10million.
But many of these transactions date back to the early 90s and will be worth considerably more now.
The 11.5million Panama Papers documents were obtained from an anonymous source by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, who shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Some documents have been made public already but more are expected to be made available next month.
Campaigners last night called for more transparency in land ownership – with some saying ownership in tax havens should to be banned altogether.
Community Land Scotland chairman Lorne Macleod said: “We need as much transparency in land ownership in Scotland as possible.
“I know the new Land Reform Bill that just passed in the last month or so is going some way towards that, with a register to be set up to show who are the ultimate beneficiaries in terms of ownership. But at Community Land Scotland we want to push as much community ownership as possible.
“There are fantastic examples of how this has worked, including the Isle of Eigg and Harris.
“Community ownership gives the opportunity to as wide a number of people residing within the community to maximise the benefits of the land. It’s the way to go.
“The problem is that when communities are interested in purchasing land that is maybe not on the market, with Panama registration, they might not even know who the owner of the land on which they reside is.
“It’s a ridiculous situation and it definitely needs addressed. The fact that this matter has come to light so forcibly with the Panama Papers will spur people on to push for even more transparency.”
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.
The Land Reform Bill passed last month includes new protections for tenant farmers and an end to tax relief for sporting estates.
But amendments that would have seen restrictions placed on the amount of land an individual can own, and to stop land ownership via offshore tax havens, were voted down.