Sam Wollaston

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167 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 29 Jun

Sam Wollaston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Today in Focus · Life on the porch of an empty mansion · 29 Jun 2026 podcast

So it was a bargain.

Yeah, exactly.

It didn't sell and Evergrande went bankrupt.

It's quite hard to find out actually who owns these properties.

But if you look on the land register, it says it's owned by a company called Vision Perfect Global Limited, which is based in the Virgin Islands.

It's a shell company.

And we found out that it was bought by Hui Kaiyan, who was China's richest man at the time.

And he was the founder of the Evergrande Property Empire.

And actually, I just looked on the company's house website and the name has been changed from Hui to his wife.

And her name is Ding Yu Mei.

They've since got divorced.

So we now know it's in Ding Yu Mei's name and she is a Canadian citizen.

So it's a palace in limbo.

So last year, there were 300,000 long-term empty properties in England, which was, I think, up 14% on the previous year.

And that's not including second homes that are empty.

There's a further 268,000 of those.

The City of London tops it.

So in the City of London, one in four are not in residential use.

This includes second homes.

Kensington and Chelsea is one in nine properties is empty.

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