Graeme McCormick, a partner at Conveyancing Direct Solicitors, The Salmond Chambers, suggests certain financial due diligence be carried out at the point of land registration

For more than 20 years solicitors and many more involved in financial services have been required to spend considerable resources checking identities of their clients and the source of their money, the cost of which ultimately is paid for by the clientele of these service providers.

It is a system for which these professions are left personally exposed and the tests they have to employ idiosyncratic and chaotic. In Scotland alone this effort is a several billion-pound industry. It is many layered, and quadruplication of client and funding source is the norm. However what evidence is there that it is doing any good?

In 2015 I posed this question, and HM Treasury responded that it had considered such a review but had concluded that it was too difficult to evaluate. So we have our citizens paying for a process whose effect is of very doubtful worth created through the legendary and arrogant incompetence of the UK Civil Service.

Although financial regulation is a reserved power there is an initiative which the Scottish government could take which would go a long way in providing a platform of clean money which those of us who argue for an independent Scotland deem essential to our national well-being and international reputation.

The Land Register of Scotland wields considerable power over some of the most significant individual and corporate assets in our country, land and heritable property. A purchaser can’t claim a title to that land and property without the Keeper of the Land Register accepting an application to register it. Without land registration the asset has no marketable value. Unlike some of our European neighbours Scotland does not require a residential qualification on any individual or organisation as a pre-condition of owning part of Scotland so the need for vigilance is great.

The Scottish Parliament must introduce a clean money test whereby no land or property title can be registered unless the Land Register is satisfied as to the source of the money used to purchase these assets. In this way the Scottish government becomes the ultimate steward of all our land as it should be, given that our land is our most precious national asset, and our Land Register can be better resourced to investigate the source of money than private financial service providers.