Moji Shand: Scots whisky chief parties with film stars, but she still cleans office toilet

“We’re the spirits sponsor at the event,” she says, “and it’s just great fun to be there among the celebrities and to see the back-stage happenings. You see it on television but to be there in person is surreal. It’s a cool experience.”

So, just how does a Persian-American criminal lawyer come to be involved in the Scotch whisky business? “I usually just say, I slept with the boss,” she says with a laugh.

The truth is rather more elaborate. Moji Shand was born in Iran. Her father was a civil servant, her mother an accountant. But many Iranians loathed the Shah and his secret police, and in the late seventies the country witnessed considerable unrest and increasingly violent protests, with more than 1,000 people being killed in demonstrations against the man who occupied the Peacock Throne. The Shah’s government collapsed in January 1979 and he fled abroad, never to return. The following month, the radical cleric Ayatollah Khomeini returned from Paris. He staged, and won, a referendum and suddenly Iran was an Islamic republic.

“We left the country after the Islamic revolution,” Shand, 48, says in a 9am (LA time) phone call. “We were against the regime change; it was not a lifestyle we wanted to be part of.” She and her mother went to Germany and got visas to go on to America, where many of their family members already lived, and where Shand and her parents had occasionally visited on holiday.

“My father, unfortunately, was held back during that period,” she says. “The government would not allow him to leave. It was a really hard time, because we left with just a suitcase of clothing. No money, no nothing. My mother was in her thirties and I was just nine when the revolution happened.

“When we arrived in LA we were very fortunate. An Italian-American family we had met while here on holiday, gave the two of us jobs. We had come from a somewhat privileged background in Iran but we came here with nothing. My first paycheck in America was three dollars and 75 cents an hour. I was waiting tables and my mum was in the back, cooking.

“I remember my mum saying that on her first day, the woman who gave us the job, took her by the hand to the toilet and said, ‘clean’. My mum held her tears back but when the boss left she burst into tears and thought, ‘I’m being asked to clean a toilet.’ But then she told herself, ‘I’m not proud, I’m going to do it, I want to give my daughter the freedom to grow up, and I’m doing this for her’. She still cries about it, but the last time she did, I said, mum, you taught me also that work is nothing to be ashamed of.

“I now hold a law licence and I’m the CEO of a Scotch whisky company, but to this day I have no issue with that - I still roll up my sleeves and clean the office toilet if it needs it. That experience, and my parents’ sacrifice, really instilled a work ethic in me. I embrace all my experience and I embrace all challenges. I don’t find shame in anything. As long as you work as honest day for an honest day’s pay, that has always been my motto.”

Her mother, “being a typical Persian mother”, wanted her to become a doctor. Shand studied biology as an undergraduate student; but this was at the time of the O.J. Simpson murder prosecution (he was charged with, and subsequently acquitted of, the 1994 murders of former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman) and her head was already being turned by the prospect of making a career in the law. Like millions of others, she watched the coverage daily. “I found myself glued to the TV and thought, I want do to this’. A few years later, when the Iraq-Iran war was underway, she thought of becoming a war-criminal prosecutor - she was, she says, fascinated by The Hague, where the UN’s International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court can be found. She secretly applied for law school and was accepted; her father, when he finally told him, was thrilled, and he said her mother would be, too.

Shand indulged her new passion at law school, where she excelled. Afterwards, she spent four years working for a law firm, and was involved in, among other things, high-profile criminal cases, before joining another law firm, in downtown LA. She had undergone an expensive divorce but worked round the clock to the point where she could pay all her bills and buy her own home. More to the point, she became the firm’s senior supervisor, with more than 90 lawyers reporting to her.

She was doing exceptionally well for herself, but a turning-point came in 2006, when she began to feel decidedly burnt-out. She sold her home and moved, on an impulse, to Spain. But, feeling “terribly homesick”, she rang a close friend, who advised her to fly to Scotland, where a group of Americans happened to be on a whisky-tasting holiday. They would, he said, remind her of home. “That was my fate,” Shand says now. “I went on the next flight out to Scotland, I discovered Scotland, and Scotch whisky, and I met Euan Shand, too.” Shand at that time was involved with Duncan Taylor, which had been founded in Glasgow in 1938 as a cask broker and trader and was now importing whisky.

Moji remembers a heatwave-drenched Scotland that was “superbly beautiful and extremely charming. I thought, my gosh, this is heaven. I started touring distilleries; Duncan Taylor was the only independent I visited, and I found it really exciting. I found the whole cask-maturation and the artisanal elements associated with the maturation of whisky, is not something associated with just one distillery.

“You, as an independent, have the privilege of spreading the word about all the distilleries in Scotland. Having learned that, I wanted to spread the word as well, because I found it to be really, really interesting.” She quickly became hooked on whisky and on the wider industry.

Up until that point, Shand says, she drank whisky without being a genuine enthusiast. “I came from a cocktail background - you know, just girly drinks. But in Scotland I found the taste of whisky to be amazing. I love the sweet whiskies. I love the fact that you don’t down it, you sip it. It’s more of a social drink, whereas with cocktails you just down them and within a few minutes you’re drunk and you’ve lost the experience of the day. But whisky has a history behind it: first of all, you travel through the years it has taken.”

She and Euan first met, then, in Scotland in 2006. Three years later, he flew to LA on a business trip. They met up, and began dating. Two years later they were married, in a ceremony at the picturesque mountain resort of Lake Arrowhead, hidden in the hills of San Bernardino Mountain, about an hour outside L.A. She has been the CEO for the last five and a half years. Duncan Taylor now sells its fine whiskies in more than 50 overseas countries and this year it is looking to expand into the United Arab Emirates and to seal deals with UK supermarkets to sell its Indian Summer gin and its portfolio of whiskies. It is also planning to build a distillery, capable of producing 1.5 million litres a year, and a visitor centre at its base in Huntly. At the same time, Moji has made a success of her own, LA-based company, Shand Import LLC, which imports speciality craft spirits from around the world, and is the largest importer of Duncan Taylor’s own craft spirits. It reports that its 2017 sales doubled to more than $4 million - not bad, Moji says, when you consider that its US team consists of a mere half-dozen people.

Duncan Taylor will be co-sponsoring the Critics’ Choice awards next year but more immediately it will sponsor a private party at the home of an internationally famous singer, at which an equally famous actor will receive a lifetime achievement award. And it will also sponsor a Navy SEALs award event.

Shand has worked hard for her success and couldn’t be happier with the way everything has worked out. She has a lifestyle that suits her down to the ground, too. “This morning I’m having this call with you,” she says brightly, “and in the evening I’m going to dress all fancy and go to the LA Magazine whisky festival. So I go from rags to riches every day, and wear whatever hat is thrown at me.”

And she’s serious, by the way, when she says that whisky is for sipping, and that you travel through the years whenever you raise a glass to your lips. “I remember,” she says, “a friend of mine once downed a 33-year-old shot of whisky. Euan looked at him and said, ‘Don’t down it like that.’ The friend said, ‘What do you want me to do? Babysit it?’ And Euan said, ‘Yes - it’s taken 33 years to get that unique flavour’. I was very much fascinated by that.”