‘Me a risk? I could bore you to death,’ says murder plot laird

A former Scottish laird who was jailed for twice plotting to murder a woman is appealing the extension of an order that bans him from contacting her and her family.

Malcolm Potier, 70, was jailed for six years in Australia in 2002 for soliciting a hitman to murder the woman who cannot be named for legal reasons.

Potier paid a fellow detention centre inmate £4,600 to kill his victim and her boyfriend, but would-be assassin Alessandro Basso fled to his native Italy with the money.

Potier – who beat off Rolling Stone Mick Jagger to buy the Gigha island, just off the Mull of Kintyre for £5.4million in 1989 – is forbidden from contacting seven individuals, including the woman and some members of her family.

The former property magnate owned landmark buildings in Glasgow before he lost his company in the early 1990s and Gigha was repossessed by a Swiss bank.

Potier’s sentence was extended by 12 years in 2006 when he plotted against her life again while in prison in Long Bay, New South Wales.

The woman is now in a worldwide witness protection scheme after Potier’s conviction for incitement to murder in Australia.

Following his release from jail in 2015, he flew to the UK and was made the subject of a violent offender order (VOO) brought forward by the Metropolitan Police.

The order, brought under section 100 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, states: ‘[Potier’s] persistent and obsessive behaviour, with regards to establishing contact … has left all concerned suffering from severe anxiety and being in constant and grave fear for their safety.’

An interim order preventing Potier from making contact with the victim and her family was imposed on the day he landed in the UK.

The VOO must be renewed every five years.

Potier challenged the order when it was up for renewal in May 2021, claiming that some of the seven individuals covered by the order had made ‘false’ statements to the police to keep the VOO in place.

He told Westminster Magistrates’ Court: ‘Not in any way shape or form do I represent any danger to those persons.

‘If there had been these terrible things which are said to have happened, there would be records, there are none.’

The VOO was renewed.

Today, wearing a black suit with a checked shirt, Potier appeared at Southwark Crown Court, representing himself, to discuss arrangements for appealing the renewal.

The former laird wanted to cross-examine five individuals included in the VOO at the appeal hearing, scheduled for next month (June).

The woman who he was jailed for plotting against was not one of the five individuals he wanted to question.

Judge Martin Griffith ruled against him.

‘They should not be brought to court in order to be cross-examined,’ the judge said.

‘This is a rehashing of the events of 20 years ago rather than what the…appeal is all about, which is whether or not this violent offender order should be renewed.’

Speaking outside court, Potier called the order ‘a nuisance’.

‘I don’t particularly like having to walk around subject to onerous orders which should not be there,’ he said.

He denied being a danger or a risk to anyone.

‘I’m absolutely not a risk. I’m just pretty boring these days.’

Originally from Sevenoaks, Kent, Potier trained as a surveyor and made a fortune with his company Tanap Investments.

At the height of his company’s success in the late 1980s, Potier estimated he was worth £25-30m.

It was at this time, just before he turned 40, that he bought Gigha, celebrating his birthday on the Scottish island.

‘The intention was that it would be described as nothing trivial. It wasn’t trivial,’ he said of the birthday bash.

In 1991, two months from completing a building project in Glasgow, a homeless person walked into the building in the middle of the night and started a fire.

As a result, Potier’s company crumbled and creditors seized his assets, including the island, but he was never declared bankrupt.

‘I didn’t care about anything else,’ he said, ‘But I did care about the island because it was important to me.’

Now in his 70s, Potier said he lived ‘quietly’.

‘I do a lot of unpaid legal advice. Very amateurish.

‘My life could be better. How, I’m not sure.

‘If you become…bitter and things like that you really don’t become able to function effectively.’

Potier, of Dawes Lane, Sarratt, Rickmansworth, is appealing the renewal of the violent offender order on 30 June at Southwark Crown Court.