Banned businessman loses battle with cancer
BY GORDON CURRIE reporters@dailyrecord.co.uk
A TROUBLED tycoon who tried to ban ramblers from his land over kidnap fears has died after a battle with cancer.
Businessman Euan Snowie – whose family sold their waste management firm for £40million before a bitter feud tore them apart – was 53 when he died on Thursday.
He had a string of run-ins with the law and was banned from acting as the director of a limited company for nine years in 2018.
His family capitalised on the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001 to make a fortune from Government payments to their waste management company.
Snowie, his three brothers and mother sold the company to Irish-owned Oran Waste UK Ltd for around £40million.
In 2007, Snowie tried through a civil court action to have ramblers banned from land round his home at Boquhan Estate, Kippen in Stirlingshire. He claimed his family’s wealth meant they would be put at risk of kidnap unless the un-forested portion of the estate was excluded from the Scottish Parliament’s 2002 right-to-roam legislation.
In 2014, Perth Sheriff Court heard the Snowie family had been torn apart by a feud sparked by a massive unpaid loan between the brothers.
The bitter bust-up led to allegations about violent threats, sledgehammer-wielding rampages and police involvement.
Snowie claimed his brother
Gordon had tried to boot him out of his country mansion and declare him bankrupt.
Euan then made a phone call to Gordon’s wife which led to his arrest and trial on a charge of making threats to her and her family. He was found not guilty. In 2016, he was fined £1000 for assaulting daughter Louise, then 20, in a row about the use of a luxury car and was admonished for smashing windows at his wife’s farmhouse.
In 2018, Government lawyers had him disqualified from holding office as a director, arguing he was “not a fit and proper person”.
Administrators revealed his Snowie Solutions Ltd property firm had debts of more than £12million.
It was part of Euan Snowie Holdings Ltd owned with his former wife Claire, 52. The couple, who separated in February 2017, were subject of a sequestration order that year.
Snowie, who died at Forth Valley Royal Hospital, is survived by his estranged wife, partner Vikki, and his three children.