With his brilliant mind and impeccable credentials, it’s little wonder that wealthy clients trusted him with their fortunes. Then they started to get suspicious
Ewan McKay is a quiet, trusting man with a lifelong passion for golf. Growing up in the 1950s in Angus, a windswept county on Scotland’s east coast, he found the sport a perfect outlet: a shared activity that reduced the pressures of socialising. Later, as an adult, golfing allowed him to rub shoulders with wealthy farmers who became useful contacts for his expanding business, selling Scottish seed potatoes to English farms. Once he sold that business, McKay had enough money to follow his dreams and create a course of his own.
In 2002, McKay bought a plot of land in St Andrews and secured planning permission for a golf course and private members’ club. But two years later, he received an offer of £20m to buy the land. “It was the kind of sum you couldn’t turn down,” he recalled. He made a profit of £13m from the sale, and while he was golfing down in Kent in 2004, a friend suggested he ought to meet a solicitor called Stephen David Jones, who was a master at whittling down tax bills. “He said, ‘What are you doing about tax?’” McKay told me. “And I said, I wasn’t thinking about tax. I just pay it. And he said: ‘I can introduce you to someone brilliant.’”
When McKay spoke to Jones, the lawyer suggested that he put his money into a trust on the Caribbean island of Nevis. Jones’s law firm would act as the trustee and McKay’s children would be registered as the beneficiaries. This, Jones explained, was the smartest way of arranging his tax affairs.
McKay did his due diligence on Jones, inviting him up to Dundee to meet lawyers he knew. “Every single one of them thought he was plausible, charming and obviously extremely well known in respect of tax,” he told me. Jones seemed the epitome of an urbane, chivalrous Englishman. He read the Financial Times, sent his son to Eton and was rarely seen not wearing a waistcoat. He lived in a red Victorian mansion block in Little Venice, a prime area of west London. After meeting Jones, one of McKay’s lawyer friends said, “You’ve got yourself a cracker here.”
In January 2006, Jones’s law firm, Jirehouse, registered the Scotia Trust Foundation in Nevis. Since Jirehouse was its sole trustee, only Jones and his colleagues had direct access to information about the assets it held for McKay’s family. Jirehouse created three further Scotia entities in Nevis. And, as Jirehouse was a director, secretary, partner or trustee in all four of the Scotia entities, Jones could sign paperwork on Scotia’s behalf without consulting McKay.
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