AN American couple who had made their home in the Highlands and invested their savings building up an award-winning business have seen their hopes of staying here ruined after a judge upheld the Home Secretary’s decision to send them home.

And Russell Felber told The National the first he heard about Lady Carmichael’s ruling was in a phone call from a local newspaper.

He and his wife Ellen, who are both in their 50s, fell in love with Scotland on holiday and came here six years ago to make their home.

They had an entrepreneur visa and spent more than £400,000 upgrading a bed and breakfast that had been used as student accommodation, transforming it into an award-winning establishment.

Under the terms of their original three-year visa, the UK government required them to employ either two full-time employees for 12 months or one employee for 24 months.

The couple employed someone for 24 months and were granted a two-year extension.

They settled comfortably into community life and Ellen even took up bell-ringing at their local church.

But when they applied for leave to remain early last year, the Home Office refused to grant their application, after retrospectively applying a rule change that had been made in 2014 regarding the number of people they had to employ.

Last Christmas, they received notification from the Home Office that they had 30 days to leave the country. The couple then took legal advice and the case went to the Court of Session in Edinburgh.

Carmichael ruled yesterday that Amber Rudd did not act unlawfully when she decided the Felbers did not meet the legal requirements to remain in the UK.

Advocate Alan Caskie had argued that it was unfair for Rudd to make a decision using the 2014 rules when his clients had acted in accordance with their visa requirements.

He told the court earlier: “This is a case where the application of common sense and discretion should be applied.”

Carmichael’s written judgement at the Court of Session concluded that the home secretary had acted correctly.

She wrote: “The court’s function will usually be limited to reducing a decision that has been taken where a discretion has been found to have been exercised in an unlawful manner.

“It is normally outwith the proper scope of judicial review for the court to tell a public authority how it should exercise its discretion.

“While there may be cases where there could only be one possible outcome in the lawful exercise of discretion - this is not such a case.”

With his wife crying in the background yesterday, Russell told The National: “The first we heard about it was in a call from The Courier today. I’ve spoken to our lawyer, but he has a 30- or 40-page document to go through and he hasn’t had a chance to do that properly yet.”

Russell did not want to comment further until he had spoken to his brief.

The Felbers’ MP Drew Hendry, who has been fighting for the pair to remain, said the decision was “callous and disgusting” and he would be raising it in Parliament.

“The fact that it took the court so long to make a ruling is an indication that this was not as clear-cut as the UK Government though it was,” he said. “But it is callous and disgusting and another example – after the Zielsdorf family were forced to leave their home and business and go back to Canada – of how mean-spirited the UK Government’s one-size-fits-all immigration policy is and of the damage it is doing the Highlands.”