# Scottish property worth billions owned by tax haven firms (The Ferret, 21 June 2020)

* **Revealed: Scottish property worth billions owned by tax haven firms**
* By Joe Lo. Published in The Ferret on 21 June 2010
* [https://theferret.scot/scottish-property-billions-tax-haven](https://theferret.scot/scottish-property-billions-tax-haven/)
* **Summary**:
* * Foreign companies own £4.4 billion worth of Scottish property, The Ferret can reveal, leading to calls for greater transparency to stop Scotland losing out on tax revenue.
  * Concerns have also been raised about the need for urgent action to stop criminals using opaque foreign companies to invest in Scottish property as a front for money laundering.
  * Registers of Scotland data obtained by The Ferret shows that on the last day of 2019, 3,237 Scottish properties were owned or leased by companies based outside of the UK.
  * The companies buying these properties paid a total of £4.42bn for them. They are likely to be worth even more than that today.
  * Further Ferret analysis shows that about 60 per cent of foreign owned property was bought by companies based in [tax havens](https://theferret.scot/tag/tax-havens/), allowing them to avoid paying tax. These 1,851 companies paid £2.76 billion for the properties.
  * [Jersey](https://fsi.taxjustice.net/PDF/Jersey.pdf), [the Isle of Man](https://fsi.taxjustice.net/PDF/IsleofMan.pdf), [the British Virgin Islands](https://fsi.taxjustice.net/PDF/BritishVirginIslands.pdf), [Guernsey](https://fsi.taxjustice.net/PDF/Guernsey.pdf) and [Luxembourg](https://fsi.taxjustice.net/PDF/Luxembourg.pdf) are the places whose companies own the most Scottish property.
* **Keywords**: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, tax havens, tax justice, corporate landlords, money laundering, home ownership