A FORMER businesswoman and volunteer firefighter has been refused a £280,000 insurance pay-out after a judge ruled that she started a blaze that destroyed her hotel.
Kathleen Toremar insisted the fire at the Bunrannoch Hotel, Kinloch Rannoch, Perthshire, had been an accident, and told a court her late husband had revealed its cause to her in a dream. She said a sauna heater was to blame, but Lord Brodie dismissed
the claim.
Mrs Toremar, 52, told the Court of Session in Edinburgh that she had worked in international banking before going into the hotel business with her then husband, Christer Arne Toremar, in 1993. He died in October 1996, and she continued to run the business and serve as a part-time firefighter.
She described herself as a foreign exchange treasurer specialising in Islamic investment in the Third World. She said she set up banks or branches of banks, although she accepted she had no academic qualifications as an economist. She said she was "just extremely clever".
In May 2000, the hotel was operating as a public house only, and Mrs Toremar locked up and left with her four younger children late on a Friday night to visit her parents in England.
Her 18-year-old son, Thomas, was working as a barman in another hotel in the area and staying in a cottage. In the early hours of the morning, he saw smoke coming from the roof of the Bunrannoch Hotel and raised the alarm. He feared his 16-year-old sister could be inside the hotel. He tried to get to her bedroom by a fire escape, but was driven back by smoke.
The building was extensively damaged, and the court heard the site had been sold after the fire for £36,000. Mrs Toremar's insurer, CGU Bonus Ltd, refused to meet her claim for the damage. She sued the company for £280,000 in the Court of Session, and conducted her own case.
The insurer said the fire had been started deliberately by Mrs Toremar in a bedroom below the sauna room. It claimed she was in financial difficulty, and said the hotel had not been trading profitably.
Lord Brodie heard days of evidence from experts in the causes of fires, and said in his judgment yesterday that he had decided it was "highly improbable that the sauna heater was the source of origin of the fire". He added: "Her persistence in pursuing this claim would seem to speak to a conviction that she is in the right as opposed to the stark alternative which is that she is both a fireraiser and fraudster whose actions had put at risk her eldest son's safety, if not his life."
London-born Mrs Toremar, of Dunoon, Argyll, bought the 100-year-old hotel with her former husband in 1993. She remarried in March 1997, but that marriage lasted just over a year, and she married again in July 1998.
She is unlikely to face criminal proceedings, in spite of the judge's ruling.
The Crown Office said last night: "We can confirm that the procurator-fiscal in Perth has not received a report in relation to the incident and individual."
The full article contains 541 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
