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Land reform campaigners are alarmed at the increasing use of a legal loophole that allows landowners to conceal the price paid for Highland estates from the public register.
Andy Wightman, a land reform analyst, said the loophole meant the prices paid in more than £300m-worth of Highland property transactions were not disclosed on the register.
Discovery Land Company, an Arizona-based luxury resort operator building a Highland resort at Taymouth in Perthshire, used the mechanism when it paid £21.4m in 2022 for the adjacent Glenlyon estate, famous for its hill walks and deer stalking.
Wightman’s latest sales survey reports that Oxygen Conservation, the “capitalist” rewilding firm aiming to be the UK’s largest private landowner, also used the mechanism to withhold the fact it paid £42.75m for two of its Scottish estates from the public land register.
To the surprise of land reformers, the John Muir Trust (JMT), one of the UK’s best-known wild land charities, used the tactic when it paid £1.73m for a holiday chalet park and £75,000 for 166 hectares of adjacent land at Kylesku near Assynt in north-west Scotland.
The firms involved insist this tactic is legal but Wightman, the Scottish Land Commission and Community Land Scotland have urged ministers to tighten up the law, arguing it undermines attempts to make the land market much more transparent.
The commission, set up by Scottish ministers to reform the country’s highly concentrated land market, says the tactic “does not demonstrate good practice in responsible ownership” as it obscures prices, yet is being increasingly used.
“Transparency in land market data – including accurate sales values – is vital to provide a robust evidence base to inform sound policy and effective legislation,” the commission said.
“Land is a shared natural asset,” said Josh Doble of Community Land Scotland. “It is simply unacceptable that those acquiring the largest pieces of land can obscure transaction details, when any homeowner has to provide that information publicly for comparatively minuscule property transactions.”
The loophole involves buyers opting not to put the price paid for the land into the box marked “monetary consideration” in the registration form given to Registers of Scotland, the agency that records property transactions.
Instead they insert the legal term “implementation of missives” in the box marked “non-monetary consideration”. That means the purchase price does not appear in the title deeds for that property and therefore does not appear on the public land register.
In order to find out the price paid, people need to write to Registers of Scotland to ask specifically for the application form used to register the sale and pay a fee of £25 plus VAT.
Wightman, who used crowdfunding to pay for the application forms used in his report, said he was writing to Scottish ministers to change the law to make it mandatory for the sales price to be put on the title deeds.
He said landowners and agents were using the loophole to “consciously” conceal the price paid. “Scottish ministers need to amend this legislation to make it clear that where a price is paid, that price is disclosed on the title sheet,” he said.
The Scottish government said it was investigating options to change the rules. A spokesperson said the keeper of the registers of Scotland, Jennifer Henderson, had no power at this time to instruct someone to put the price into the title deeds.
“The Scottish government is currently working with the keeper to identify the potential scope to improve transparency in these cases,” they said.
Oxygen Conservation said it fully supported transparency but said confidentiality on sales prices was often requested by the seller of the land. “Oxygen Conservation complies fully with the current legal framework and do not believe it is appropriate to characterise lawful registration practices as concealment,” it said.
JMT said it believed this approach was standard practice but would now investigate whether it could now make the sales prices publicly available on the land register. “The John Muir Trust is committed to transparency and openness in all areas of its operations and governance,” it said.
Discovery Land Company did not respond to requests for comment. Par Equity, which paid £35.3m for Glen Dye grouse moor in 2021 and did not put that in the “monetary consideration” box, said: “It is sometimes the case that purchase or selling price is subject to confidentiality agreement at the behest of the seller.”
