As yet another Highland estate is sold off to an absentee landlord,
Margaret Vaughan considers the case for land ownership restrictions
AN heiress to the richest and most secretive family in Britain is
Scotland's latest absentee landlord. Lisbet Koerner, a Harvard professor
who, with her academic husband Joseph, lives in a splendid old colonial
home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Her new playground is 48,000 wild acres of the West Highlands, the
Corrour estate, a sporting paradise of stalking, trout fishing, and
grouse shooting, bought for #3m.
Lisbet, 35, is the eldest daughter of Hans Rausing, a Swedish-tax
exile who, with his brother Gans, heads the league of the super-rich
with a fortune estimated at #5.2 billion.
Prising out information about the family is about as easy as opening
one of the Tetrapak milk cartons on which the fortune was built. The
brothers have clung fiercely to privacy since joining their father's
company and launching the tetrahedron-shaped milk packages in 1952.
In the early eighties the brothers made their homes in Britain, it is
understood, to escape the taxation laws of their Scandinavian homeland.
Lisbet married her American husband Joseph, a fine art historian and
graduate of Harvard and Cambridge in 1988. They have two children,
Benjamin and Sigrid. In August her father sold the family business
interests to his brother. The sale put Lisbet, who had been mentioned as
a possible heir apparent to the company, firmly out of the picture. It
may, though, explain her decision to invest #3m in the remote acres of a
sporting estate which lies some 30 miles north of Fort William.
The softly-spoken, slightly lisping lecturer whose specialism is the
history of science, was maintaining the family tradition of discreet
silence after news of her purchase slipped out.
It seems unlikely that the isolated Corrour estate, reached by a
12-mile dirt road, has been bought as a commercial proposition. Locals
believe the couple and their two children plan to holiday there, leaving
the day-to-day management to the staff of four who maintain the estate.
''Well, I suppose it's better them than somebody wanting to destroy
the estate with a holiday development,'' was as much as any local would
say about the purchase.
But, then, Highlanders long ago became used to the insecurities of a
system of land tenure which allows anyone to purchase vast swathes of
the last wilderness acres. No other country in Europe allows the
free-market sale of land on such a scale.
Despite Michael Forsyth recently astounding crofters by calling on
lairds to follow the Government's example and hand over their land to
the people, many of the large Scottish estates remain the property of
absentee landlords. They range from Middle East oil sheiks to Pacific
Rim investors, Dutch and Danish companies to rock stars.
The Scottish Crofters Union, who broadly welcomed Mr Forsyth's
initiative, insist there remain real concerns in parts of the Highlands
and Islands about the ownership of land. Not least, perhaps, on Eigg
where islanders wait to learn their fate as their latest laird, the
German artist Maruma, is investigated by the public prosecutor's office
in Stuttgart over a #1.6m loan.
Last week, a 41,000-acre estate in the Cairngorms, Glenavon, was sold
to a Malaysian businessman. Near Stranraer, the Logan estate, which has
been in the same family for 700 years, has been sold to a London-based
businessman.
Both Labour and the Scottish National Party want to see land reform.
They believe Scotland's archaic feudal system needs to be changed to
give security to local communities and protect the environment.
Rob Gibson, the SNP's land spokesman, said it proposed radical
policies which would seek to create widespread ownership of land and
coastal resources by resident populations: ''We would be prepared to
take powers to favour residents over absentees when property is sold.''
Labour MP and publisher of the radical West Highland Free Press, Brian
Wilson, has long campaigned for land reform. ''We need a Land Commission
to examine every proposed sale, with power to intervene where social or
environmental interests are involved.''
The Scottish Landowners' Federation, meanwhile, has welcomed the
inward investment which the new owners of the Corrour estate are making
in Scotland. They argue that the cost of buying and running such a vast
sporting estate is so high that the majority of Scots couldn't afford
it.
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