Victory for whisky investors in fight against distillery that 'lost' their casks

13 July 2023 , 08:29

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Victory for whisky investors in fight against distillery that 'lost' their casks

There’s great news for some whisky investors whose valuable casks had gone “missing”.

I told last month how Bill and Kate Miles had been trying in vain to trace their hogshead – a cask containing up to 250 litres – of Speyside Distillers whisky, you can find that story here.

They bought it in 1997 but had been struggling since 2018 to get the distillery to tell them what had happened to it.

Speyside claimed it might have been repossessed by the previous owners of the distillery because the couple failed to pay for its storage.

Whisky investor Bill Miles

But retired Australian doctor Bill said he was never asked to pay storage and, in any case, any fees would only cost a fraction of the value of the whisky.

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He got nowhere, even after hiring lawyers who told Speyside Distillers: “Any retention or disposal of the cask by the company is plainly unlawful.”

Sarah Johnson had a similar problem trying to locate the cask bought by her father James, of Clitheroe, Lancs, in 1996.

This is a butt, twice the size of a hogshead, so quite a difficult thing to lose, you might think.

Yet Speyside Distillers could not tell Sarah what had happened to it, and left her feeling “fobbed off or ignored”.

After I took up their cases the distillery blamed poor record keeping by the previous owners, who sold the business to new owners in 2012. I pointed out at least one problem with that excuse - the LinkedIn page of the current managing director Patricia Dillon states that she has been managing director since 2009.

As for their excuse that it "takes time" to locate the whisky cask, Dr Miles has been trying to resolve this issue since 2018.

Now I’m delighted to say that both of the company has offered the investors replacement cask whisky or the cash equivalent.

For Sarah, that’s £32,543.

“We’ve decided to go for the lump sum, we don’t want to go through this again to get our money,” she said. “Thank you very much, we don’t think we’d have got anything without your help.”

Bill and Kate will be getting £16,855.

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“I am simply flabbergasted and cannot find the words to thank you adequately for what you have done for us,” Bill told me. “I had written it off as a ‘never again’ life experience.”

Speyside Distillers said it would not be commenting.

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Andrew Penman