Argyll’s Loch Lomond Golf Club may see members’ buy out

For Argyll has reported earlier on the troubles faced by Loch Lomond Golf Club whose Arizona-based owner recently handed it over to  a team of business rescue specialists appointed by HBOS.

Now there is a plan for the existing eight hundred members to raise  around £100 million to buy the course and turn it into a private members’ club like Augusta National, which hosts the US Masters tournament.

An unoffical executive committee has been set up and the proposal is being described as a ‘front runner’ in the competition between eight or nine bids for the club that annualy hosts the Barclays Scottish Open in July.

A leading figure in the initiative is Ken Lewandowski, Scottish Captain at Loch Lomond and former Chairman of Hibernian Football Club. Mr Lewandowski who is bullish about the proposal, says: ‘I have played at Augusta six or seven times and while the golf course there is magnificent, the place isn’t a patch on Loch Lomond’.

Club members pay a joining fee of £65,000 which is refundable when they leave. They have recently been informed that annual subscriptions are to rise from £3,250 to £7,000 for members based in Europe and to £3,750 for members based elsewhere.

At the moment Loch Lomond’s annual running costs are around £9 million. Niall Flanagan, the Club’s General Manager appointed by current owner Lyle Anderson – whose company also owns Ayrshire’s Dundonald course, says that it is close to being profitable on an operating basis.

An insight into the nature of the place comes when Mr Flanagan goes on to explain why there is no immediate prospect of the course being opened to the public. ‘We’ve done that with Dundonald but we would not be able to handle it at Loch Lomond. It would be very tough suddenly to have 100 folk every day paying £50. It just wouldn’t work. This club has a place in the market. There is a higher echelon and that is where it should be kept.’

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