ISLAMABAD, May 23: Five British trade missions will visit Pakistan this year to explore business opportunities in Pakistan, British High Commissioner in Pakistan Mark Lyall Grant said here on Tuesday.

Speaking at the launching ceremony of the UK land investments group here, he pointed out that the trade missions that visited Pakistan last year also had the representation from the group.

He said the United Kingdom was the single largest investor in Pakistan, with 80 British companies operating in the country.

The British envoy said the opening of the UK land investments group in Islamabad was a sign of excellent bilateral relations between the two countries.

The business development director of the group for Asia Majid Khan said the group operations would be expanded to other major cities of Pakistan, including Lahore, Karachi, Sialkot, and Faisalabad.

He said the group would offer individual investors in Pakistan the opportunity to invest in prime, undeveloped land in the UK with a view to achieving high returns in a stable economic market with the added security of a legal freehold ownership.

The group was established three years ago and was today the UK’s largest land investment company with thousands of acres of land under its direct ownership and careful management satisfying a growing international client-base of 25,000 investors.

For the first time the Pakistani investors were being provided with the opportunity to diversify their investment portfolio through an international company based locally, the group director added.

He said that the group would not stop at only offering investment opportunities in the UK, but had formulated a dynamic second phase expansion to its latest Asia office by earmarking an initial investment of 10 million pounds in local mixed development projects.

He said that a joint venture consortium established by the group here had already launched an aggressive bid for one of Pakistan’s latest mixed development venture.