Ex-laird jailed for murder plot

Potier's empire once included Gigha

A former owner of a Scottish island has been jailed for six-and-a-half years in Australia for trying to arrange the murder of his child's mother and her lover.

Malcolm Potier, 50, who once held the title "Laird of Gigha" when he bought the island off the Mull of Kintyre, was arrested in Sydney in early 2000.

He had snatched his two-year-old daughter from her mother.

Potier was found to have entered Australia on a false passport and sent to a detention centre in Sydney while awaiting a Family Court hearing over custody of his daughter.

Potier: Calls from detention centre

Whilst there, Potier met a man who agreed to kill the child's mother and her boyfriend.

However, when the man was released from detention he took the 12,000 Australian dollars Potier had paid him for the job and fled to Italy, the court was told.

Potier later made frequent phone calls from the detention centre to an Australian woman he had befriended, asking her to find him a hit man.

The woman contacted police who sent in an undercover agent posing as a hit man to record his conversations with Potier about the attempted killings.

Charges denied

Potier pleaded not guilty to the attempted murders.

He said he had simply asked his friend to find someone who could dig up evidence showing his former lover's boyfriend was abusive and a threat to his daughter so that they would not win custody.

Gigha, an idyllic island

At New South Wales State District Court, Judge Greg Hosking ordered Potier to serve a minimum of five years in prison.

The former chartered surveyor built up a vast property empire in the 1980s and the idyllic island of Gigha off Scotland's west coast was the jewel in the crown.

But the island was repossessed by a Swiss bank in 1992 and islanders who lent money to Potier were left out of pocket.

Gigha is now owned by its residents who successfully secured possession of it when the last laird, Derek Holt, put it up for sale last year.