It is unlikely that his favourite football team, Inverness Caledonian Thistle, will ever get to Wembley — they are Scottish, after all — but at least Dougie McGilvray can say his giant crawler cranes have graced the English national stadium, as well as the Emirates, Arsenal’s home ground, and the site of the 2012 Olympic Games in East London.
Indeed, there are few giant infrastructure projects in the UK that Mr McGilvray and Weldex, his family-run company, have not been not involved in. To leading sports stadiums can be added Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and all the new bridges built in the Highlands and Islands over the past three decades. Weldex, based in Inverness, is Britain’s largest crawler crane hiring company, leasing the big, mobile beasts of the British construction industry.
Yesterday Mr McGilvray and his family sold an undisclosed stake to Dunedin, the private equity house that has also bought out Weldex’s previous external investor Northern Venture Managers.
The deal values Weldex at £100 million. Weldex is reckoned to be among the fastest-growing sizeable private businesses in the land. Its profits increased by around 45 per cent a year for much of the past decade to £10 million last year.
It was founded by Mr McGilvray in 1979 with his wife, Kaye. Their children Margaret, 42, and Iain, 37, are among the business’s executives. The company, which employs more than 100, also supplies various types of heavy-duty lifting equipment.
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Mr McGilvray was for a time the chairman of and a leading shareholder in Inverness Caledonian Thistle up to 2000, the year they knocked Celtic out of the Scottish Cup. Altogether everyone: “Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious.”