By Dave Finlay 

A SHAMED priest whose colourful private life propelled him into the public eye has been ordered to pay more than £140,000 in damages to a former chip shop operator on a Hebridean island.

Father Roddy MacNeil, who was suspended from his parish after getting his cousin pregnant, lost a court action brought by his brother-in-law John Gray over his father’s estate.

Donald MacNeil died in 2012, and his estate has been at the centre of a bitter legal dispute among the family.

It centres around a 15-year deal struck between Mr Gray and the MacNeils in 2005 to run a chip shop attached to a petrol station owned by Donald MacNeil on the island of South Uist.

Mr Gray and his wife Michelle ran the chip shop from 2005 up until 2012 when the late Mr MacNeil cut the electricity supply to the premises and refused to let him in.

The Sheriff Appeal Court in Edinburgh heard the relationship between Mr Gray and the petrol station owner had deteriorated for several years and by 2008 was “hostile”.

Father MacNeil, dubbed Father Flash because of his lavish lifestyle, hit the headlines in 2006 when his married cousin Hilda Robertson, 44, became pregnant by him and gave birth to a daughter while he was parish priest at Our Lady of the Sea on Barra.

He was on holiday with student Jennifer Gilbert, 22, when Mrs Robertson revealed she was pregnant.

The clergyman, who was close friends with Princess Diana’s mother Frances Shand Kydd and officiated at her funeral in 2004 in Oban, Argyll, was removed from his parish on Barra after the pregnancy was made public.

Mr Gray has now successfully sued Donald MacNeil’s estate for £141,000 plus interest to cover the money he claims he would have earned if he had been able to run the chip shop for the full 15 years of the original deal.

Mr Gray raised an action at Lochmaddy Sheriff Court where a sheriff found he and the late Mr MacNeil had verbally agreed to lease the forecourt shop at the petrol station and it would be converted into a chip shop.

The lease would run for 15 years from the chip shop opening. But the sheriff ruled the verbal lease was invalid and the deceased was entitled to withdraw from it.

Mr Gray’s lawyers challenged the finding and asked appeal sheriffs to substitute an alternative finding it was invalid as creating a real right in the subjects but was effective in creating purely personal rights and obligations which bound the parties and the late Mr MacNeil was not entitled to withdraw.

The appeal court accepted a breach of the agreement on the terms established by the sheriff may give rise to a claim for damages.

The appeal sheriffs said: “We conclude that the terms of the agreement established by the sheriff give rise to personal rights and obligations between the parties even though they could not constitute a lease without being reduced to writing.”

They awarded £141,117 against the estate.