Santander’s £2.5m backing for ex-rugby star Jim Aitken’s grain business

FORMER Scottish rugby captain Jim Aitken has secured £2.5 million in bank funding to expand his grain storage business.

Aitken, who led the national team to a Five Nations Grand Slam in 1984, raised the loan from Santander Corporate Banking.

The loan purchased two stores for Alexander Inglis & Son (AIL), whose overall facilities have a combined capacity of more than a quarter of a million tonnes.

The new stores, near St Boswells, in the Borders, and Swarland, Northumberland, will mainly be used in the malting and distilling industry. They should be able to produce around 50 million litres of whisky from 110,000 tonnes of grain.

Aitken bought the East-Lothian based company in 1985, and has since transformed it into a firm with a £50m turnover.

AIL is one of just two independently-owned grain merchants in Scotland. With three million tonnes of Scots grain produced each year, two-thirds is used in malting and distilling.

Whisky is worth more than £4.5 billion a year to the British economy and that value continues to rise, with exports up 23 per cent in the first nine months of 2011, mainly because of the demand for luxury goods in Far Eastern markets.

Aitken is best known for his 24 international caps for Scotland and for the Grand Slam win.

He said: “It’s been great working with the team at Santander Corporate Banking who really took the time to listen to our business plans and see the value in this next stage of investment in our business. This is an exciting time for our business, and I look forward to our next phase of development.”

Santander announced the appointment of four posts north of the Border last week, mainly poached from the Lloyds Banking Group. The company is currently increasing its presence in Scotland in the hope of breaking the grip of RBS and Lloyds on the business banking market.