ONE of Scotland’s richest men, the businessman Lord Laidlaw of Rothiemay, is to come to the rescue of the troubled English National Opera with a donation of £2m.

Laidlaw, who has almost single-handedly kept the Scottish Conservatives afloat since 1997, is to help to finance a number of productions over at least two seasons at the Coliseum in London’s West End.

His intervention will be a huge relief to the opera company, which has been beset by a wave of financial and managerial problems.

In the past three months ENO has lost its chairman, Martin Smith, its chief executive, Sean Doran, and its music director, Oleg Caetani, who resigned before he had even started. Last month the company was threatened with a strike by staff.

A number of Scottish arts institutions may be envious of Laidlaw’s decision to pour his millions into supporting the arts in the capital. Financial problems forced the Scottish Opera to shut its main operation last summer and it will reopen this spring without a full-time chorus.

Laidlaw made his fortune from IIR, the events, conference and newsletter business which he founded more than 30 years ago and sold last summer. Before the £768m sale, of which his stake was worth a reported £714m, he was named 101st richest person in Britain in the Sunday Times Rich List, published in April 2005. At the time his wealth was calculated at £499m.

The 63-year-old, who was made a life peer in 2004 on the recommendation of the former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, saved the party from financial ruin during some of its darkest days. His decision to support productions, rather than to fund the ENO’s general finances, may prove shrewd. The Coliseum’s artistic reputation has so far been unscathed by its organisational problems. It is currently staging Jonathan Miller’s “mafia” version of Verdi’s Rigoletto.

The ENO’s financial problems are just the latest in a longer saga. It had to be bailed out by the Arts Council with £9m in 1997 before being helped again in 2003 with an extra £10m. The ENO also received lottery awards of £22m towards its £41m refurbishment which was completed in January 2004. On top of all this, the ENO is given an annual revenue grant of £16.5m from the Arts Council.

Laidlaw has been wooed by the ENO’s board over the past few months. Until now he has been better known for a love of boats and fast cars. He was unavailable for comment this weekend.

Laidlaw’s donation is all the more needed as MFI, the furniture group, has decided not to renew a £300,000 sponsorship towards Wagner’s Ring Cycle. However, Sky Television is providing £5m over six years from 2003 to 2009. A new funding scheme, organised by ENO board member Peter Bazalgette, who is better known as the television executive who brought Big Brother to Channel 4, aims to raise £500,000 for innovative projects.

The ENO also plans some collaborations with the Young Vic in London as part of its plan to seek a younger audience. One new opera which will inevitably raise eyebrows next year is about the Libyan leader Colonel Gadaffi. This will run at the Coliseum.

By contrast, the Royal Opera House has been on a far more stable financial footing since it reopened after its refurbishment in 2000. It suffered an embarrassing setback last year when an important backer, the Cuban-American Alberto Vilar, had to pull out of his sponsorship because of financial problems. However, Alan Parker, a Geneva-based British millionaire, came to the rescue while in 2004 Donald Gordon, the accountant, pledged £10m.

The ENO is now searching for a new music director. The British conductors Edward Gardner and Jonathan Darlington have been mentioned as possibles, as has the American Andrew Litton.

The company is also looking for a new chairman. Andreas Whittam Smith, who founded The Independent newspaper before serving as president of the British Board of Film Classification from 1998-2002, is said to be interested in the post. For the past four years he has been a Church of England commissioner.

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