SCOTLAND - OUR LAND?

A guest post by Kyle Renton

The Isle of Rona has been sold.

The last two people living on the island - off the coast of Skye - are preparing to leave. The new owners? Daniel Luhde-Thompson, a hedge fund manager, based in England, and Cressida Pollock, a high-level financial consultant and former CEO of the English National Opera. The deal was done quietly, through a company called Fior Rona Ltd. The old owners? A Danish couple by the names of Dorte and Arne Jensen.

Another island gone. Another community erased. Another piece of Scotland now owned by someone with wealth, connections, and no stake in the life of the land.

And this is the part we need to face:

There is very little we can do about it - not enough to stop the tidal wave of offshore, elite land acquisition.

Because we are not an independent country.

While Scotland remains under Westminster control, we do not have the power to stop billionaires, Conservative aristocrats, hedge fund donors, or global corporations from buying up our land, our homes, our natural resources, and our future.

Holyrood lacks the full legal power to block these sales outright - especially when ownership is routed through offshore entities protected by UK company and trust law. It cannot enforce land transparency. It cannot protect communities from being priced out, or stop offshore trusts from acquiring vast estates. Because these powers - like so many others - are still reserved to Westminster.

This is how it happens: slowly, silently, legally. One island at a time. One estate at a time. One shell company at a time. Until Scotland becomes a patchwork of private retreats, corporate playgrounds, and sealed-off havens for the rich.

Meanwhile, ordinary Scots can’t afford to live where they were born. Local services are gutted. Crofters are evicted. Schools and post offices close. And yet the land - our land - is still being sold, over our heads, without our consent.

People rage about immigration and refugees - as if the threat is people arriving with nothing. But the real threat is people arriving with everything. With lawyers. With lobbyists. With Cayman Islands bank accounts. They don’t come to join Scotland. They come to own it.

Until we are independent, this will not stop.

This was all packaged as a quiet transaction. But let’s not pretend this is just about one island.

This is part of a broader shift - Scotland is being sold off, silently, piece by piece, to billionaires, trusts, and shell companies. While people wring their hands about immigration and refugees - those seeking safety and work - we ignore the real colonisation happening in plain sight.

This isn’t an isolated event. It’s part of a wider pattern - one that is accelerating. Scotland’s land is being bought up by hedge fund managers, foreign billionaires, and political donors. And while public conversation continues to obsess over immigration and asylum seekers - as if people fleeing war and hardship are some kind of threat - the real takeover is already happening. The danger isn’t refugees arriving in dinghies. It’s the multimillionaires flying in on private jets and walking off with entire islands.

Anders Holch Povlsen, Denmark’s richest man, now owns over 220,000 acres of Scotland across thirteen estates, including Aldourie Castle and Kinloch Lodge. The media loves to frame him as an environmentalist, but in truth, it’s just another consolidation of power. Rewilding, when done by a billionaire, is not liberation - it’s enclosure. Community access is limited, local voices are shut out, and decision-making is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

The Discovery Land Company, an American luxury developer, has taken over the 8,000-acre Taymouth Castle estate, with plans to build a high-security resort for the super-rich. Locals have protested. Land reform campaigners have demanded a public interest test. But as usual, no one with actual power is listening.

Dunbeath Castle and its 28,000-acre estate were sold for £25 million to an undisclosed foreign buyer, believed to be Texan oil baron Kelcy Warren. The deal is buried under offshore trusts, and even elected officials can’t determine who actually owns the land. Scotland’s legal framework allows this. The people of Caithness don’t.

The Kildrummy Estate - 5,500 acres - was sold to Californian millionaires Christopher and Camille Bently. Their marketing frames them as “green lairds,” but the reality is the same: land once lived on and worked by communities is now packaged as a private eco-retreat for wealthy foreigners.

Even corporate giants are joining the land grab. Abrdn, formerly Standard Life, bought the Far Ralia estate for £7.5 million with the goal of planting trees to generate carbon credits. It’s investment wrapped in the language of sustainability. Former community and heritage lands are being transformed into financial instruments - forests not for people, but for portfolios.

Then there’s the hospitality sector. MGM Muthu Hotels, a Singaporean-Indian

conglomerate, has quietly acquired at least nine hotels across Scotland, from Nairn to Oban, Fort William, Tyndrum, and Glasgow. Many of them are now partially abandoned or in poor repair. Local jobs have disappeared. Infrastructure is left to decay. The profit flows offshore. The responsibility doesn’t.

It gets darker. Gaddafi-era officials laundered millions into Scottish property. Ali Dabaiba, a former Libyan regime insider, is suspected of using stolen oil money to buy hotels and estates in Scotland, including the Kenmore Hotel. These were acquired through British Virgin Islands shell companies - corrupt money washed clean through Highland land.

Inverinate Estate, 63,000 acres in Wester Ross, is owned by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai. His estate includes multiple lodges, helipads, and private roads. What was once part of a shared landscape is now an international holding, controlled by a foreign royal family.

Auch and Invermearan - 30,000 acres - was purchased by Ming Wai Lau, the son of a Hong Kong property magnate and convicted criminal. The purchase was made through an offshore shell company. Again, community consultation: none. Transparency: none. Consequences: permanent.

And then there is Jura. Once a place of writers, crofters and wild isolation, it has quietly earned a new nickname: the Tory Isle. A growing number of properties are now owned or occupied by English conservatives, financiers, and aristocratic dynasties.

The Tarbert Estate is owned via Ginge Manor Estates Ltd, registered in the British Virgin Islands. Beneficial ownership is traced to William Astor, 4th Viscount Astor - father-in-law of former Prime Minister David Cameron. Control of the estate is reportedly now held by his children: Flora, William, and James Astor.

The Ardfin Estate, 11,600 acres, was purchased by Greg Coffey, an Australian hedge fund manager, through a Jersey-based company. He shut down public gardens and turned the grounds into an ultra-exclusive golf resort and private playground for the global elite.

The Forest Estate is owned by the Vestey family, a dynasty of British barons, with a long colonial and aristocratic history.

In addition, smaller parcels across Jura are held or leased via opaque offshore trusts and companies, limiting community oversight and local influence. The legal structure ensures maximum privacy and minimal accountability.

The Fletchers of Ardlussa, a long-established Jura family originally from Fife, still hold significant land on the island - but like many such families, they’ve married into the aristocracy. The Orwell House, where George Orwell wrote 1984, is owned by the Fletcher family. Their daughter-in-law is Sophie Allsopp, sister to Channel 4 presenter Kirstie Allsopp. Both are daughters of Charles Allsopp, 6th Baron Hindlip of Dorset, a Conservative hereditary peer in the House of Lords.

So while some roots run deep, the ownership now entwines with privilege, title, and offshore financial structures. Jura, like much of Scotland, has become a portfolio.

And the pattern doesn’t stop there. Across Scotland, entire islands are now owned outright by billionaires, tax exiles, and aristocrats.

Gometra, part of the Inner Hebrides, is owned by London-based eco-activist Roc Sandford. Though not a billionaire, he controls an entire island under private stewardship with little public input.

Eilean Aigas, a private island on the River Beauly, was originally bought in 1995 by Malaysian businessman King Chong Chai. He later sold it to Brendan Clouston, a Canadian telecoms billionaire and close associate of Bill Gates. The estate has changed hands among the global elite, with the baronial mansion now totally private.

Eriska Island on Loch Linnhe is now operated as a luxury resort owned by a Hong Kong-based family firm, Creation Gem. It offers fine dining, spa treatments, and total seclusion - for those who can pay for it.

Sanda Island, off the coast of Kintyre, has been owned since 2010 by Swiss businessman Michi Meier. The island is largely uninhabited and off-limits - another piece of Scotland sectioned off for private leisure.

And Shuna, a 1,100-acre island in the Inner Hebrides, long held by the Gully family, is currently up for sale. Asking price: £5.5 million. That’s the going rate now for an entire island in Scotland - assuming you’ve got the cash and a lawyer on the Isle of Man.

And all the while, Daniel Luhde-Thompson - new owner of Rona - stands not only as a land-buyer but as a political player. The firm he works for, registered in the Cayman Islands, donated £4 million to the Labour Party. He personally donated £500,000 in 2024. That’s not just wealth. That’s influence. That’s how policy gets shaped - quietly, behind closed doors, offshore.

Meanwhile, the harsh reality is that Holyrood is effectively powerless to stop any of this. Westminster holds the legal authority over land acquisition, foreign ownership, and transparency. Denmark, by contrast, has strict controls on who can buy land and under what conditions. Scotland has none. Because we’re not truly in charge - not of our resources, not of our laws, and certainly not of our land.

We keep being told to worry about the wrong things. About migration. About asylum. About people coming here with nothing and taking little. But the real crisis is people coming here with everything - and taking everything.

Scotland isn’t owned by Scots anymore. And if that doesn’t change, it never will be again.

Rona was once part of the ancient lands of Clan MacLeod. After the 1745 Jacobite rising, many Highland families who backed the Stuart cause faced ruin. The MacLeods of Raasay and Rona were among them. Cut off from royal favour, isolated politically and financially, they struggled to recover.

By the early 1800s, their Jacobite history had made them untrustworthy in the eyes of the establishment. In time, their debts became unmanageable.

And so, in 1843, Rona - along with Raasay and Fladda - was sold to George Rainy for £35,000. Rainy was the son of a Scottish minister from Sutherland, but his wealth came not from the Highlands - it came from the sugar plantations of Demerara, in what is now Guyana. He built his fortune as a partner in Sandbach, Tinne & Co, a company that profited from one thing - slavery - and was compensated richly when slavery was abolished.

He used that compensation money to buy Highland land - and then cleared it. Dozens of crofting families were evicted. On Raasay alone, Rainy cleared every township but one. On Rona, displaced families were pushed onto poorer ground. Marriage was banned. Families were broken. The island emptied out.

The land was taken not just from the MacLeods - it was taken from the people. Not by law, but by force, wealth, and ownership.

And now, nearly two centuries later, the pattern repeats.

Not through slavery money - but through hedge funds. Not with eviction notices - but through shell companies. The means have changed. The logic has not.

This time, Rona is lost not for backing a king - but for being part of a country still controlled by one. A country where we are told we are equal, but have no power to protect our own land. Where millionaires can walk in and buy entire islands, while communities are told there’s no money for housing or schools.

Rona belonged to families who lived there, worked there, cared for its wildlife and its memory. Now it belongs to a hedge fund manager and a financial consultant - people with no connection to the island except a title deed and a tax structure.

We lost Rona once for resisting domination. We’ve lost it again - because that domination never ended.

Scotland deserves more than to be sold by the acre. We deserve the right to hold our land - and our future - in our own hands.

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