Welcome back to episode 8 of page 94, the Private Eye Podcast now officially with more

episodes than this joke will comfortably accommodate. My name is Andrew Hunter Murray

and this week we will be talking to Michael Heath, the legendary irascible cartoonist who is celebrating 60 years

of drawing funny things but before that readers of the magazine may have noticed that there was a huge

piece in the back of this week's issue on who actually owns Britain. In total there is a

chunk of the country the size of Surrey which is owned from outside or by

foreign registered companies and by various parties who would rather keep their identities secret for whatever reason.

I spoke to two of the I's investigative team about how exactly they found this out and what we can do about it.

Here they are.

So I'm here with Richard Brooks and Christian Erikson, who both been investigating foreign

land ownership and dodgy estate planning basically all over the country.

Is that a fair summation of what's been going on?

Yeah, it is, but just to be clear, the land is very much England.

This is England's very green, very pleasant land, thousands of acres of it, owned by offshore companies.

Exactly how many thousand acres are we talking about here?

We're not sure of the total, but we have found out that since 1999

four hundred ninety thousand acres have been bought up by companies based in

tax havens

that's a pretty big area that's bigger than greater London and it's bigger than

Surrey. And I think it's said in the article there were is it 97,500 properties

which fall into this category which is owned by

say again is it foreign companies these are foreign registered companies okay yeah

...