As a super-rich tycoon with a VERY chequered past, his Highland pile was once a sanctuary. So why is he now at war with neighbours (and the MOD) over his controversial wind farm plans?

There was a time when Christopher Moran visited his Scottish estate most weekends. This scenic tranche of upland Banffshire was his ‘sanity’, the multi-millionaire financier used to say.

‘I come here for the solitude. In London I can work 24 hours a day. But here, I unwind.’

When he and his then wife Helen arrived at Aberdeen Airport on Friday nights, an estate worker would be there to whisk them into the foothills of the Grampian mountains, where the 17-bedroom Cabrach Lodge awaited.

There he would change into his made-to-order estate tweed plus fours.

A passionate furniture collector, the laird filled his Scottish bolthole with antique marvels and regaled guests with their histories. Back in 1992, the only disappointment at Cabrach Lodge was his office – empty but for a telephone. 

The ‘right’ desk for it simply hadn’t come along yet, he would explain. ‘I don’t believe in compromise.’

More than three decades on, life is markedly different on the 48,000-acre estate Mr Moran acquired in two transactions in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The 75-year-old is today viewed as an absentee landlord. There is, in fairness, much taking up his attention in London, not least his 20-month-old daughter Iva, by current partner Emily Rae.

A more frequent presence in the Cabrach is son Jamie Moran, 36, and the figure many in the community refer to as his ‘minder’. Although he is not always introduced at meetings with neighbours, it turns out this is Sir Hugh Orde, 65, the former chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

‘I can’t quite wrap my head around the career trajectory there,’ says one local – but, as we shall see, the finance whizz and the ex-police chief go back some years.

The most obvious change on the estate is to the landscape itself. Almost 60 turbines form the Dorenell wind farm whose operators pay rent estimated at more than £1million a year to the landowner.

Now, to the horror of many in the community, Mr Moran is looking to extend his wind interests. The more advanced plans are for 22 turbines measuring up to 650ft on his land.

They are described as phase three of the Clashindarroch wind farm, whose other two phases – one yet to be built – are on adjacent property.

‘Scoping’ is also taking place for an extension to Dorenell wind farm, with a formal planning application expected soon.

If everything planned for the Cabrach is approved, it would turn this hitherto unspoiled patch of upland Scotland into what locals call ‘the UK’s largest onshore wind park’.

Members of the sparsely populated community scarcely dare to contemplate that eventuality. They say the Cabrach – an area steeped in whisky history – had already reached ‘saturation point’ with giant turbines.

And yet they are acutely aware of the enthusiasm with which the Scottish Government waves through wind farms.

All of which has brought a distinct froideur to the place Mr Moran once viewed as his safe haven. Ever since his estate

got into the renewable energy business, he has been labelled a ‘wind farm vulture’, pocketing the lucrative rents at the expense of his neighbours and the landscape. But then, not everything, perhaps, has changed since Mr Moran’s early days of estate ownership.

Now reckoned to be worth some £400million, the colourful laird still shows no signs of believing in compromise.

The history of his tenure in this part of North-East Scotland is a long and chequered one, but it was in his native London that he first made headlines.

Born in modest circumstances in the north of the city, he was by the age of 12 a Financial Times reader and a natural entrepreneur.

He launched his first company in his teens and, when it floated on the stock exchange a few years later, he was set up for life.

He became a broker for Lloyd’s – a contemporary remembered him as ‘probably the best young brain’ they had.

But it is for a less enviable distinction that he is chiefly noted: Mr Moran was the first Lloyd’s broker to be expelled in 300 years for ‘discreditable conduct’.

His disgrace even made it into the New York Times.

A few years later he was censured by the Stock Exchange Council and, in 1992, he was fined $2million in the US for insider dealing. And yet, it seemed, his ability to make money remained unerring. By the 1990s, Mr Moran was a regular fixture in the Sunday Times Rich List – indeed he has been known to complain to the compilers that they have undervalued his wealth.

‘Astronomically wealthy’ is how he is on record as describing it.

His London address since the early 1990s is the 15th century Crosby Hall in Chelsea, on the bank of the Thames. The spectacular Tudor pile – he is estimated to have spent up to £40m renovating it – was once home to King Richard III and Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor.

Given the astronomical sums he was spending in London, the Cabrach estate and the neighbouring Glenfiddich deer forest, which he bought for £1million in 1982, may have seemed small beer in comparison.

Yet, long before wind turbines put him at odds with his Scottish neighbours, tensions had been simmering.

There was the row in the late 1990s over a community bid to extend the graveyard at Cabrach Parish Church, which would have meant eating into a third of an acre of Mr Moran’s land. He refused to sell it at any price – not even £1million, he said – and stood firm even when local councillors threatened to make a compulsory purchase.

His mother Iva was buried in the graveyard, which was now running out of lairs, but the extension would ‘just look awful,’ he claimed. It was never built.

The estate was dogged with lurid headlines involving wildlife crimes in the 1990s. The worst year was 1998, said the RSPB, when almost a third of the reported incidents of bird poisoning in Scotland occurred on the Cabrach estate.

It said ten rabbits, six pigeons, six grouse and two hares were laced with a lethal pesticide and left out on the hill as bait for birds of prey.

According to the charity, a peregrine falcon, two buzzards, a crow, a gull and a stoat were poisoned as a result – and they suspected countless others suffered the same fate.

‘This represents by far the worst group of incidents on a single estate ever recorded,’ claimed the RSPB, but proving which individual did it was nearly impossible. That said, the estate’s head gamekeeper at the time, Stanley Gordon, was convicted of having a dead peregrine in his Land Rover. It had been poisoned.

Little wonder, perhaps, that Mr Moran’s enthusiastic support for the Conservative Party has long excited nervousness. As Prime Minister, John Major is believed to have rebuffed an offer of a donation. It is understood a renewed offer was rejected under Iain Duncan Smith’s leadership too.

When David Cameron became leader, Mr Moran was widely reported to be one of the donors to whom the party returned a total of £5million to prevent their identities being revealed under a law change about donations.

It was in 2009 that the plan to build 59 turbines on his estate first surfaced – along with promises from the developer Infinergy of the substantial benefits such a facility would bring to the community. Fifteen years on, many locals struggle to identify what they are.

The then director of Ramblers Scotland, Dave Morris, was an early critic. ‘Christopher Moran and wind farms deserve each other,’ he said at the time.

‘Too many landowners have their noses deep into the renewables trough and their backsides pointing towards Scotland’s wild and magnificent scenery.’

Mr Moran remained undeterred. His former wife Helen once said of him: ‘When he wants something he will stop at nothing to get it.

‘He wants people to remember what he has achieved and he’s very persuasive – quite ruthless, really.’

The wind farm went up and the rent rolled in.

As resentment grew in his corner of Scotland, the laird soon found himself dealing with a more pressing PR issue down south. A newspaper investigation revealed that Chelsea Cloisters, a huge apartment block he owned, was a hotbed of prostitution.

So rife with vice was the 670-flat complex that it earned the nickname Ten Floors of Whores. Mr Moran, who said he knew nothing about the illegal activity, launched a clean-up operation, reportedly appointing his friend Sir Hugh Orde to mastermind the task.

Certainly it was in the wake of the scandal that the former police chief became a director of Realreed – the company which runs the serviced apartments – in April 2019.

One source said: ‘Sir Hugh was brought in to clean up the Cloisters, and was able to identify a number of sex workers who were subsequently removed.’

Five years later, Northern Ireland’s erstwhile most senior policeman stalks the uplands of Banffshire with Mr Moran Jnr – the exact dynamic of their partnership a mystery to most locals they meet as they roll out their wind farm extension plans.

It is the younger man who does the talking, they say.

‘I think he’s there to keep a close handle on what’s being said and what’s not being said and everything in between,’ ventures one.

Another, Colin Mackenzie, who owns a farm steading and holiday lets close to the estate, says he has never spoken to the laird and rarely seen him.

He describes the new wave of turbines spearheaded by the estate as a ‘national disaster’ which would destroy not only landscape but wipe out heritage. His closest contact with Mr Moran was on the dance floor at the estate’s annual ceilidh a few years back.

The event was mothballed during the Covid years but was then revived last year when, to their surprise, some members of the community surrounding the estate received invitations.

Perhaps, they thought, this would be an opportunity to build bridges.

And yet, the Mail understands, after responding that they would like to attend and detailing plus ones and dietary requirements, a number received emails saying they had been invited in error.

Patti Nelson, chairman of the Cabrach Community Association, said the area had ‘certainly been dealt a difficult hand across the last 40 years’.

She added: ‘Issues associated with landowners and landownership in the Cabrach are of course sensitive matters, as we are all part of the one community.

‘But the Cabrach faces an unfair, imbalanced situation which is genuinely threatening the ability of individuals and families to live in the area. And now absentee landowners look to grossly profit, at the material expense of the local community. The parallel to a modern-day Highland Clearance is not unfounded.

‘We implore Scottish Government ministers to tune into what’s happening in the Cabrach.’

For Jonathan Christie, chief executive of the Cabrach Trust charity, the prospect of an area ripe for sensitive regeneration being forested over with turbines is an appalling one.

The Trust’s headline project is a one-of-a-kind, community-owned single malt Scotch whisky distillery, scheduled to open later this summer. It will create vital local employment, act as a visitor destination and direct profits into the Cabrach.

He told the Mail: ‘This is a community with the potential of becoming an exemplar for rural regeneration in action. The alternative creates the acute risk of becoming the case study for what happens when Scottish Government policy for a Just Transition goes wrong.

‘The Cabrach community has weathered a difficult history but has persevered and we’re now on the cusp of making substantive progress in reviving this special place.

‘However, with a third wave of onshore wind developments navigating Energy Consent Unit planning proceedings, the community is left feeling voiceless and impotent in the face of what can only be described as an unrelenting pattern of consents at any cost.’

It was, of course, Christopher Moran who, all those years ago, refused to hive off a third of an acre of his land as a final resting place for the community’s dead on the grounds it would ‘just look awful’.

He has not spoken publicly on how he feels turning the Cabrach into the ‘UK’s largest onshore wind park’ would look.

Neither he, his son nor Sir Hugh responded to our requests for comment.

A crumb of comfort for those desperate to preserve the area came from the Ministry of Defence this week. It objected to the Clashindarroch extension on Mr Moran’s land, claiming RAF Lossiemouth pilots, who train in the area at altitudes as low as 250ft, could crash into the turbines. They would also interfere with radar sites.

Back in London, there are more problems for Mr Moran’s Chelsea Cloisters. It is facing a £4.5million bill for unpaid VAT after Realreed lost a tribunal case against the HMRC late last year.

The financier will likely be in no mood to lose another battle in Scotland.

j.brocklebank@dailymail.co.uk