Asil Nadir, the Turkish Cypriot who built Polly Peck International, once Britain’s fastest-growing company, before going on the run after it was discovered he had stolen millions from the conglomerate, has died. He was 83.
Tributes poured in on Monday in the Turkish-held north of Cyprus, where the one-time fugitive businessman was regarded as a hero and for many years had lived in exile and isolation.
“Every person is as long-lived as his works. Asil Nadir is immortal with his works,” wrote Hasan Hastürer, a columnist in Kıbrıs Gazetesi, the newspaper once owned by the tycoon.
Doctors at the privately run Kolan British hospital confirmed that Nadir had died at 22.43 local time on Sunday. He had been in intensive care for several weeks after reportedly being diagnosed with pneumonia.
Once one of Britain’s richest men, a Conservative party donor and frequent visitor to Downing Street, Nadir faced charges of stealing £34m from Polly Peck, the fruits-to-electronics empire he founded in the 1980s.
A court concluded that the ill-gotten gains were used to “greedily” fund a lavish lifestyle that included finely cut suits, racehorses and country homes. Nadir always denied the 66 charges of false accounting and theft made against him.
Taking advantage of Turkish-occupied Cyprus’s lack of international recognition, which extended to the absence of an extradition treaty with Britain, the disgraced magnate fled to the territory on a private jet in 1993 before his trial was due to start.
For the next 17 years he lived in a fortified villa, much of it as a virtual recluse watching satellite TV to help him through his “terrible homesickness”. In 2003 after falling foul of the mini-state’s nationalist leadership – run-ins that made him even more determined to return to Britain – he became, to the surprise of many, a vocal advocate of UN efforts to reunify war-split Cyprus.
“I miss the countryside and ordinary British way of life,” he told the Guardian during his time in exile.
When in 2010 a judge at the Old Bailey granted him bail, he declared himself delighted at the prospect of standing trial and “clearing my name” and in August that year voluntarily returned to the UK.
But in 2012 he was found guilty by a British court of plundering nearly £29m from Polly Peck, which he bought as a struggling textiles manufacturer and built into a business powerhouse with a stable of brands from Japan’s Sansui Electric to a division of Del Monte fruits.
Four years into a 10-year sentence, UK authorities, citing a tax-saving scheme that allowed foreign convicts to serve time abroad, agreed in 2016 to Nadir’s request to be transferred to Turkey for the remainder of his term. After spending one night in jail there, Turkish authorities ensured he was released.
Back in northern Cyprus, Nadir set up the Kibris media group and pursued real estate and other business interests while becoming a generous Tory benefactor and occasionally entertaining visiting MPs.
In its heyday Polly Peck was the top-performing stock on the London Stock exchange. Its spectacular collapse left thousands of shareholders and employees out of work and out of pocket. Some saw the scandal of its meteoric rise and fall as emblematic of the excesses of the 1980s and a precursor of future financial crises that highlighted the perils of mixing business with politics.
Shortly before he took flight, Nadir was given a watch by Michael Mates, then a minister in the Northern Ireland Office, engraved with the words: “Don’t let the buggers get you down.” With his downfall came Mates’s enforced resignation.
Born in Lefke, Cyprus, the thrice-married Nadir began selling newspapers on the streets at the age of six before moving with his family to London. His big break came when the Turkish-Cypriot administration invited him to take over crop export plants on fertile orchards taken from displaced Greek Cypriots in the 1970s.
Even in his final days, drama pursued Nadir. Last week it was widely reported in the breakaway state that the tycoon had died in intensive care at the Kolan British hospital before doctors were forced to deny the story. It was Nadir’s wife who broke the news in a post on social media late on Sunday.
Reuters contributed to this report
