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.’”
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