The billionaire owner of bottled water company Highland Spring has been hit by defaults and enforcement actions from creditors across his family’s heavily indebted property empire. The family of Mahdi Al Tajir, the United Arab Emirates’ first ambassador to the UK who was ranked for years as the richest man in Scotland, is now looking to sell chunks of a real estate portfolio that spans luxury developments in London to sprawling estates in the Perthshire countryside. Bahrain-born Tajir amassed a fortune in Dubai as one of the most trusted advisers to Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed al-Maktoum, the emirate’s former ruler who in the 1960s and 1970s developed it into a diversified entrepôt by channelling oil revenues into commercial infrastructure.
Described as Dubai’s “Cardinal Richelieu” by another senior adviser, his influence waned in the early 1980s when Sheikh Rashid’s sons, including current ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, consolidated their authority. Tajir bought a raft of British trophy properties and country estates in the 1970s, including a Kent stately home featured in early James Bond spoof Casino Royale, at a time when Middle Eastern investors entered the British property market in earnest. He also amassed a collection of historic English silverware, including a record purchase in 1993 of a chandelier designed for King George II.
In 1979 he established Highland Spring in the Scottish village of Blackford after buying nearby Keir House, the ancestral home of SAS founder David Stirling. It became the UK’s largest brand of bottled water, sourced from the surrounding Ochil Hills. Property companies owned by Tajir’s family have borrowed heavily in recent years, both from Gulf banks and US institutional investors such as Apollo Global Management.
The 94-year-old last month put a more than 620-acre golf resort near Gleneagles up for sale. While the g West course was completed in 2009, it never opened to the public and an adjoining hotel and residential development were not completed. National Bank of Kuwait, which provided a £12.75mn loan against the Perthshire golf course, according to its 2024 annual accounts, filed a breach of contract claim in London’s High Court in August against three members of the Tajir family. Mereworth Castle in Kent was among a series of trophy assets bought by Tajir.
The house doubled as James Bond’s home in 1967 film ‘Casino Royale’, in which Soviet agents blew it up. Full details of the lawsuit are not yet available. Accounts for the company behind g West, filed in December 2025, noted that NBK’s loan had matured the previous month without being repaid and said the business was in “extension discussions with the lender”.
NBK did not respond to a request for comment. The Tajirs embarked on a major reorganisation and restructuring a couple of years ago, according to people aware of the process. One of them insisted it was “business as usual” for the family, adding that their lenders were unfazed by the debts.
However, in June, one of the family’s lenders repossessed a mews house they owned in London’s affluent Belgravia, according to an official notice seen by the FT. Swiss bank UBS held a mortgage charge on the property, according to the Land Registry. UBS declined to comment.
The family was dealing with this and other issues, the person with knowledge of their restructuring efforts said.
Source: Financial Times Companies · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing