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‘Guy Ritchie's is the foulest lunch of the year': Lore of the Sky, Compton Abbas, restaurant review
‘Guy Ritchie's is the foulest lunch of the year': Lore of the Sky, Compton Abbas, restaurant review

Telegraph

time05-07-2025

  • Entertainment
  • Telegraph

‘Guy Ritchie's is the foulest lunch of the year': Lore of the Sky, Compton Abbas, restaurant review

The dramatic landscape of Dorset was at its best. Blue sky and fabulously green rolling hills – I could admire it from the airfield at Compton Abbas. It was from here, in 1993, that Asil Nadir fled in a six-seater to northern Cyprus, accused of stealing from his firm Polly Peck. This particularly irked the landed locals who had piled into the multifarious FTSE hero before it went belly up. Nadir was later sentenced to 10 years, but the squires or their descendants still fume at the diminished plans for their pool houses. You don't need a private jet to visit Compton Abbas. Today, like many such small airfields, there's an eatery to pull you in. And this one is owned by Guy Ritchie, the film director who crafts extraordinarily witty movies and who has dabbled successfully in hospitality, too – he has a restaurant in London's Fitzrovia, called Lore of the Land. Lore of the Sky promised a smokehouse serving the finest fare of Texas, but in fact provided me with the foulest lunch of the year. It's a handsome modern building of slatted wood and glass, echoed by the roomy interior: aircraft-hangar cool. There's a desk in the middle from which came news that there was no trace of my booking. At least not on their side; yet the emails of confirmation, and those urging me to leave feedback (at your service, right here, right now), had flowed thick and fast. There was plenty of room, however, and we were duly taken to a dirty table by the window. Note to Lore of the Sky: better to keep punters waiting while you clean and re-lay a table than show them to one spread with the effluence of the last gobblers. The menu, making use of a vast smokery, is full of that pulled style of meat: slowly cooked and then literally forked off the bone. I fancied the pulled pork in a bun and couldn't resist the idea of 'pork belly burnt ends', either. We also ordered oak-smoked chicken leg, Caesar salad and fries, with 'smokehouse nachos' to share as a starter. Back came our charming waitress with news that they'd run out of pulled pork and its burnt ends. Yes, a Texas-style smokehouse runs out of pig. It's like Big Ben losing its bells or Margaret Thatcher without a handbag. So I went for the pulled beef instead (the other choice was 'pulled jackfruit', and if you've pulled a jackfruit something's gone seriously wrong). The nachos came: a splattered mess of stuff that had landed on tortilla chips. There was yellow gloopy goo pretending to be melted cheese, and on that bits of meat, somehow rendered green. I'd hesitate to call it chicken as that would shame the name of protein, but imagine a few weeks of life in a dingy shed with an afterlife this insulting? Sweet red sauce flowed around it. There was a squelch of avocado on the side and I picked at it briefly like a pigeon searches for nutrients in a cowpat. My pal Flozza just looked at it and said, 'Oh my god, that's revolting', refusing to brave a bite. A dish of chicken was like Epsom in winter – firm, too hard for this pony – and was drizzled in a spicy red sauce which failed to either overpower or rescue it. My pulled beef was dismal and the chips, like everything else I'd wager, the work of talent some distance from Compton Abbas. Likewise the bought-in Caesar salad sauce and croutons, and frozen-solid Yarde Farm ice cream. They call this dirty food. I'd say it was just filthy.

Asil Nadir, tycoon who fled charges of fraud and theft after his giant company Polly Peck imploded
Asil Nadir, tycoon who fled charges of fraud and theft after his giant company Polly Peck imploded

Yahoo

time10-02-2025

  • Business
  • Yahoo

Asil Nadir, tycoon who fled charges of fraud and theft after his giant company Polly Peck imploded

Asil Nadir, who has died aged 83, was a Turkish Cypriot entrepreneur who spent 17 years as a fugitive from British justice after the collapse of Polly Peck, the business empire he built up during the 1980s boom years. From modest beginnings in the London rag trade, Nadir emerged in 1980 as the buyer of Polly Peck, a small, stock market-listed fashion house. A thousand pounds invested alongside him at that stage would have grown to £1 million at the peak of his rise. In an era of 'go-go stocks', Polly Peck was for a time the fastest mover of all, combining as it did the aggressive conglomerate-building that was much admired during the Thatcher era with a whiff of exoticism in its connections to the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Nadir's expansion spree – financed by some of the most respectable banks in the City – took him into fruit packaging, mineral-water bottling, hotel developments and electrical goods. Polly Peck companies manufactured televisions, microwaves and air-conditioners; in the late 1980s, Nadir bought the Russell Hobbs brand of toasters and kettles and a majority stake in Sansui, a Japanese electronics maker. Finally, in 1989, he acquired the Del Monte canned fruit business from the US giant RJR Nabisco for $875 million – and Polly Peck, by then a conglomerate of more than 200 companies, gained entry to the FTSE 100 index of leading shares. Nadir himself was listed as Britain's 36th richest person in 1990. But in the summer of that year, widespread rumours of share-price manipulation and of black holes in Polly Peck's accounts led to an abortive attempt by Nadir to take the company private and to a raid by the Serious Fraud Office. Suspension of the shares followed, and the business rapidly imploded with £1.3 billion of debts. It was alleged that large sums of Polly Peck cash had been transferred to Northern Cyprus, where a portfolio of property had been amassed in Nadir's personal name. Eventually some 66 charges of theft and false accounting were brought against him – the total stolen from the company was later estimated at £146 million – but he complained that the SFO had abused its powers in ways which would make a fair trial impossible. In May 1993 (when his bail had technically expired, although he was still awaiting trial) he left in a private aircraft bound for Northern Cyprus, which had no extradition arrangements with Britain. There he remained in prosperous exile until August 2010, when he arrived at Luton Airport in a chartered plane, to be met by police and immigration officers on the tarmac. He duly proclaimed his innocence and his faith in British justice – and submitted to wearing an electronic ankle tag, as a condition of remaining at liberty on bail. After an eight-month trial in 2012 Nadir was found guilty of 10 specimen charges and sentenced to a decade in prison; but in 2016, having repaid £2 million he owed the Legal Aid Agency, he applied successfully to serve out his term in Turkey – where he was released after a single night in his new cell. Asil Nadir was born at Lefka in northern Cyprus on May 1 1941 and spent his childhood in Paphos, a coastal town in what is now the Greek side of the island, where he earned his first pennies as a newspaper boy. His father Irfan was an auxiliary policeman who later ran a string of small businesses in the city of Famagusta, including one which imported old London buses for the island's first public transport system. Asil (the name means 'noble' in Turkish) attended secondary school in Famagusta and went on to study economics at Istanbul University but did not finish his degree. Meanwhile, as part of Enosis (the Greek Cypriot drive towards union with Greece) the Turkish minority was encouraged to emigrate – and in 1959 Irfan moved the family to London, where he joined other Turkish Cypriots in the rag trade around Newington Green, north London, manufacturing cheap clothing under the brand name Nadir Modes. Asil worked with his father until 1965, when he branched out with a company called Wearwell, which sold clothes made in his father's workshops, and opened a string of successful cash-and-carry outlets. Having achieved annual profits of almost £700,000 by 1973, he floated Wearwell on the stock market and looked for new ways to expand. By the end of the decade, Wearwell garments were largely being finished in what was by then Turkish Cyprus for export to the Middle East. There was a huge contract for Libyan school uniforms, for example. By now Nadir was a rising business star with ambitions beyond the rag trade, and he found a vehicle for them in February 1980 in the form of Polly Peck. Having acquired 58 per cent of Polly Peck from its founders for £270,000, he watched the shares soar as he hinted at exciting moves to come. The first of these was a takeover of Uni-Pac, a fruit packaging business he already owned privately in Famagusta; next, he built up a portfolio of businesses in Turkey, including a mineral water bottling plant and a joint venture with Thorn-EMI to manufacture televisions and video recorders. Polly Peck gathered a fiercely enthusiastic stock-market following. Living up to its image of mercantile brilliance, the company occupied a mansion in Berkeley Square furnished with the finest 18th-century antiques and works of art. Nadir acquired the trappings of an English gentleman, including a landed estate in Leicestershire; he and his wife claimed friendship with Princess Margaret, and a selection of the great and the good were lined up as trustees of his proposed charitable foundation. The Conservative Party was an eager recipient of his largesse. But having hit an unsustainable peak in 1983, Polly Peck's shares plunged as doubts grew over the political risks of dependence on Turkey and Turkish Cyprus and over the financial structure of the group itself. Although investors' confidence returned strongly in the later part of the decade, Nadir expressed concerns that the market was undervaluing his efforts – while his detractors became increasingly suspicious of Polly Peck's true profitability. When the company collapsed and the SFO investigation proceeded, Nadir became a pariah in the establishment circles in which he had been so avidly courted. One of the few public figures to remain sympathetic to him was the Tory MP Michael Mates, who resigned as Northern Ireland minister after a newspaper published a letter he had written to the attorney general complaining about the handing of Nadir's case – and after it became known that he had given the fallen tycoon a watch inscribed 'Don't let the buggers get you down'. Nadir certainly seems to have taken Mates's advice to heart during his long exile in Cyprus, where he lived in heavily guarded luxury and – despite wranglings over his tax affairs – built a new empire of hotel, real estate and media interests, which included newspapers published in Turkish and English and radio and television stations. In 2008 he announced that he had won a contract to run the republic's military airport, Lefkonico, but the British-registered company involved denied any connection with him and the contract was cancelled. In response, Nadir turned his newspapers against the Republican Turkish Party-led coalition government, and promptly found himself presented with a £4 million tax demand. Soon afterwards, however, the coalition was swept out of power in a general election, and Nadir was awarded the airport contract by the new National Unity Party government (which his papers had supported) after a tender in which he was the only bidder – despite doubts as to whether any of his businesses were capable of undertaking the task. But Nadir's wealth and connections could not diminish the embarrassment he represented to a regime that longed for international respectability (and whose sponsor, Turkey, aspired to join the EU). The risk that the Cypriot authorities might one day decide to hand him over to the British prompted Nadir into offering to return to London if he could be assured that he would be freed on bail while his case was heard. His lawyers duly struck a deal, and Nadir's very public return – he installed himself and his family in a rented Mayfair mansion – was conducted more in the style of an exiled head of state than of a businessman who had left his creditors in the lurch. If Nadir's showmanship and self-belief never left him, neither did his roving eye, at home and abroad: when he travelled the world by private jet in his heyday, staff were dispatched to find girls to entertain him in his cabin at each refuelling stop. In the catalogue of Polly Peck's assets in bankruptcy was a fleet of BMWs kept for the use of what the financial columnist Christopher Fildes memorably described as 'ladies who might have been consultants'. Asil Nadir married first, during his student days, Ayşegül Tecimer, the daughter of an Istanbul businessman. They had a son, but divorced in the early 1970s; they continued to live together, however, at least some of the time, and when Ayşegül became pregnant with a second son they remarried, only to divorce again soon afterwards. Both sons were educated at Eton and Nadir remained close to Ayşegül, who continued to host parties for him and to act informally as his ambassadress in Turkey. In 2005, after a brief courtship, he married as his second wife Nur, a student intern in his media company 43 years his junior who was swiftly promoted to vice-president, announcing that 'we decide the strategy together'. She also looked after their menagerie of dogs and parrots (two of the latter were called Polly and Peck). In 2013 Nur was reported to be seeking divorce, but the marriage endured and they had a son and a daughter. She survives him with the four children of his marriages and two more by other relationships. Asil Nadir, born May 1 1941, died February 9 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.

Asil Nadir obituary
Asil Nadir obituary

The Guardian

time10-02-2025

  • Business
  • The Guardian

Asil Nadir obituary

Asil Nadir was the stock market poster boy of the 1980s who conned City bankers and private investors, not to mention the Conservative party, then staged a dramatic escape to spend 17 years as a fugitive before returning to the UK to face trial. A Turkish Cypriot immigrant, Nadir, who has died aged 83, was for many years feted as a success in the UK and Turkey. A 1991 biography of him was entitled The Sultan of Berkeley Square. Charismatic, charming and stylish, with playboy looks and lifestyle, plus an air of Midas mystery, Nadir had gone from running a family 'rag trade' business in the East End of London to a £2bn global business empire, offices and homes in Mayfair filled with millions in art and antiques, a Palladian mansion in Rutland and another country estate. Few queried how Nadir made his millions – certainly not Tory party fundraisers. Between 1985 and 1990, he secretly donated £440,000 to the party, most of it derived from Polly Peck, the textiles company he transformed into what appeared to be one of the most successful firms of the 80s. This gave him access to Downing Street receptions, senior ministers and a personal letter of thanks from Margaret Thatcher, but not the knighthood he anticipated. When Polly Peck imploded, and Nadir was prosecuted for theft and fraud, the Tories promised to return the money if it was found to have been stolen. In northern Cyprus and Turkey, Nadir bought first influence, then protection, through money looted from Polly Peck to buy banks and media interests. Polly Peck had expanded into hotels, as well as manufacturing televisions and video recorders, and for a time controlled the well-known brands Del Monte, Sansui and Russell Hobbs. This growth relied on manipulating the share price, through a covert offshore share support operation, to persuade bankers and investors to continue providing finance. That was needed to hide the 'black hole' that in 1990 finally swallowed Polly Peck, leaving creditors owed vast sums and shareholders with nothing. The only son of a Turkish Cypriot police constable turned businessman, Asilkan Nadir was born in Lefka, in the then united colonial Cyprus. His father, Irfan, ran a bus company, his mother, Safiye (nee Sevki), a grocery shop. In 1959, amid growing intercommunal tensions between the majority Greek and minority Turkish populations, the Nadirs left for London. Irfan Nadir started a clothing manufacturing business and his son was sent to study economics at Istanbul University. Asil did not complete his degree but instead married and returned to London in 1963 to help run the family business. Ten years later he was heading his own clothing group, Wearwell, which was quoted on the stock market, and living in the Bishops Avenue, Hampstead – known as 'millionaire's row'. Wearwell ultimately developed a profitable Middle East export trade, making clothes cheaply in northern Cyprus. The company's rise, near collapse and comeback in the late 1970s illustrated Nadir's ability to spot opportunities but also his propensity for over-borrowing and manipulating share prices. This put him on the City regulatory radar. Turkey's invasion of northern Cyprus in 1974 – prompted by the threat of a rightwing Greek-backed coup – offered Nadir a much greater money-making opportunity. The Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash was desperate to revive the moribund economy. Nadir negotiated the acquisition of citrus groves and an abandoned warehouse, plus generous tax breaks. These fruit and packaging activities were injected into Polly Peck, the loss-making clothing company he bought in 1980. Suddenly Polly Peck International and its colourful chairman were hot. The shares soared on City predictions of millions to be made out of oranges, cardboard boxes and, later, TVs and bottled water. The share price rocketed from 5p to £35 by 1983. As the largest shareholder, Nadir was worth £100m. By 1990 that figure more than doubled and Nadir was ranked among Britain's 50 richest as Polly Peck became the London stock market's star performer. Scepticism from those who visited northern Cyprus and new operations in Turkey was ignored. So too were questions about profitability or that Polly Peck was effectively audited by a tiny firm in northern Cyprus. Nadir accused his critics of being in the pay of Greek Cypriots desperate to smear a Turkish Cypriot success story. Between 1984 and 1989, sales increased to more than £1bn. Profits went from £61m to £161m. Nadir expanded into the US, acquiring the Del Monte fruit brands, and Japan, with the first foreign takeover of a major listed Japanese company, Sansui. But he was always reliant on bank borrowing and raising cash from investors. A secret share support operation was orchestrated by Nadir using companies and bank accounts in Jersey, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and northern Cyprus. Cash diverted from Polly Peck bought the shares, which were sold when the price rose. Polly Peck took all the risk, Nadir all the reward. This undisclosed insider dealing triggered Nadir's downfall. An Inland Revenue investigation into City stockbrokers stumbled across the share support operation in 1988. This resulted in an investigation into Nadir's personal tax affairs, which estimated the tax evaded at £50m. It revealed what a Revenue investigator described as a 'massive share ramping exercise'. When news of the tax investigation leaked in August 1990, Polly Peck shares went into freefall. Banks that had rushed to lend now demanded repayment. Others sold Polly Peck shares held as security for loans. The Stock Exchange authorities, long suspicious of Nadir, called in the Serious Fraud Office. In September the SFO raided South Audley Management, the organisation set up to handle Nadir's personal affairs and the nerve centre of the share support operations. Polly Peck collapsed the following month. In December Nadir was charged with theft and false accounting and bailed for a record £3.5m. He was made bankrupt in 1991 with debts of £375m. Nadir's response to the SFO investigation was again to suggest that Polly Peck was the victim of an international conspiracy: the Turkish president Turgut Özal wrote to Thatcher blaming Greek Cypriots for Polly Peck's problems. Nadir's political connections paid off with behind-the-scenes lobbying. The ministers Michael Heseltine, Michael Mates, Peter Lloyd and Peter Brooke were among MPs who contacted the attorney general about the case. Mates gave Nadir a birthday present watch inscribed: 'Don't let the buggers get you down.' They were left red-faced (Mates resigned) when, after protesting innocence, Nadir fled in May 1993 before the fraud trial due to be held that October. He was flown in private planes to France and from there to northern Cyprus, which has no extradition treaty with Britain. Over the years, Nadir regularly promised to return to clear his name but failed to do so. However, by 2010 he was running out of money and influence in northern Cyprus. A man often seen as lacking courage took a desperate gamble and returned to Britain. The man who arrived at Luton airport in August 2010 still talked of plots and a 'burning sense of injustice'. Nadir hoped a trial would prove legally impossible. No major fraud trial had taken place so many years after the event; potentially it would be an abuse of process. Then there was his age and his cardiac problems. If no trial took place, he would sue the SFO for millions, thereby restoring his riches and reputation. The gamble failed. Nadir gave evidence at a seven-month Old Bailey trial. His defence – funded with £2m in legal aid – was that the £150m he was accused of stealing had been replaced by cash deposits from his family, taken in suitcases to banks in northern Cyprus. But, as Mr Justice Holroyde remarked, Nadir produced not 'a single piece of paper' as evidence. He had stolen out of 'pure greed'. In August 2012, Nadir was convicted on 10 specimen counts of stealing £29m between 1987 and 1990 and jailed for 10 years. He was ordered to pay £5m to Polly Peck creditors. A Turkish airline owner reportedly paid this, because Nadir was 'a hero to his generation'. After pressure from the Turkish government – plus repayment of the legal aid and surrendering his British citizenship - Nadir was released in April 2016, supposedly to serve out his sentence in Turkey. After being held overnight in Istanbul, he was released and flew to northern Cyprus, where he still had business interests. Nadir is survived by his second wife, Nur, and six children. Asilkan Nadir, businessman, born 1 May 1941; died 9 February 2025

Asil Nadir, tycoon who fled charges of fraud and theft after his giant company Polly Peck collapsed
Asil Nadir, tycoon who fled charges of fraud and theft after his giant company Polly Peck collapsed

Yahoo

time10-02-2025

  • Business
  • Yahoo

Asil Nadir, tycoon who fled charges of fraud and theft after his giant company Polly Peck collapsed

Asil Nadir, who has died aged 83, was a Turkish Cypriot entrepreneur who spent 17 years as a fugitive from British justice after the collapse of Polly Peck, the business empire he built up during the 1980s boom years. From modest beginnings in the London rag trade, Nadir emerged in 1980 as the buyer of Polly Peck, a small, stockmarket-listed fashion house. A thousand pounds invested alongside him at that stage would have grown to £1 million at the peak of his rise. In an era of 'go-go stocks', Polly Peck was for a time the fastest mover of all, combining as it did the aggressive conglomerate-building that was much admired during the Thatcher era with a whiff of exoticism in its connections to the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Nadir's expansion spree – financed by some of the most respectable banks in the City – took him into fruit packaging, mineral water bottling, hotel developments and electrical goods. Polly Peck companies manufactured televisions, microwaves and air-conditioners; in the late 1980s, Nadir bought the Russell Hobbs brand of toasters and kettles, and a majority stake in Sansui, a Japanese electronics maker. Finally in 1989, he acquired the Del Monte canned fruit business from the US giant RJR Nabisco for $875 million – and Polly Peck, by then a conglomerate of more than 200 companies, gained entry to the FTSE 100 index of leading shares. Nadir himself was listed as Britain's 36th richest person in 1990. But in the summer of that year, widespread rumours of share price manipulation and of black holes in Polly Peck's accounts led to an abortive attempt by Nadir to take the company private and to a raid by the Serious Fraud Office. Suspension of the shares followed, and the business rapidly imploded, with £1.3 billion of debts. It was alleged that large sums of Polly Peck cash had been transferred to Northern Cyprus, where a portfolio of property had been amassed in Nadir's personal name. Eventually some 66 charges of theft and false accounting were brought against him – the total stolen from the company was later estimated at £146 million – but he complained that the SFO had abused its powers in ways which would make a fair trial impossible. In May 1993 (when his bail had technically expired, although he was still awaiting trial) he left in a private aircraft bound for Northern Cyprus, which had no extradition arrangements with Britain. There he remained in prosperous exile until August 2010, when he arrived at Luton airport in a chartered plane, to be met by police and immigration officers on the tarmac. He duly proclaimed his innocence and his faith in British justice – and submitted to wearing an electronic ankle tag, as a condition of remaining at liberty on bail. After an eight-month trial in 2012, Nadir was found guilty of 10 specimen charges and sentenced to a decade in prison; but in 2016, having repaid £2 million he owed the Legal Aid Agency, he applied successfully to serve out his term in Turkey – where he was released after a single night in his new cell. Asil Nadir was born at Lefka in northern Cyprus on May 1 1941 and spent his childhood in Paphos, a coastal town in what is now the Greek side of the island, where he earned his first pennies as a newspaper boy. His father Irfan was an auxiliary policeman who later ran a string of small businesses in the city of Famagusta, including one which imported old London buses for the island's first public transport system. Asil (the name means 'noble' in Turkish) attended secondary school in Famagusta and went on to study economics at Istanbul university but did not finish his degree. Meanwhile, as part of Enosis (the Greek Cypriot drive towards union with Greece) the Turkish minority was encouraged to emigrate – and in 1959 Irfan moved the family to London, where he joined other Turkish Cypriots in the rag trade around Newington Green in the East End, manufacturing cheap clothing under the brand-name Nadir Modes. Asil worked with his father until 1965, when he branched out with a company called Wearwell, which sold clothes made in his father's workshops and opened a string of successful cash-and-carry outlets. Having achieved annual profits of almost £700,000 by 1973, he floated Wearwell on the stock market and looked for new ways to expand. By the end of the decade, Wearwell garments were largely being finished in what was by then Turkish Cyprus, for export to the Middle East. There was a huge contract for Libyan school uniforms, for example. By now Nadir was a rising business star with ambitions beyond the rag trade, and he found a vehicle for them in February 1980 in the form of Polly Peck. Having acquired 58 per cent of Polly Peck from its founders for £270,000, he watched the shares soar as he hinted at exciting moves to come. The first of these was a takeover of Uni-Pac, a fruit packaging business he already owned privately in Famagusta; next he built up a portfolio of businesses in Turkey, including a mineral water bottling plant and a joint venture with Thorn-EMI to manufacture televisions and video recorders. Polly Peck gathered a fiercely enthusiastic stock market following. Living up to its image of mercantile brilliance, the company occupied a mansion in Berkeley Square furnished with the finest 18th century antiques and works of art. Nadir himself acquired the trappings of an English gentleman, including a landed estate in Leicestershire; he and his wife claimed friendship with Princess Margaret, and a selection of the great and the good were lined up as trustees of his proposed charitable foundation. The Conservative Party was an eager recipient of his largesse. But having hit an unsustainable peak in 1983, Polly Peck's shares plunged as doubts grew both over the political risks of dependence on Turkey and Turkish Cyprus and over the financial structure of the group itself. Although investors' confidence returned strongly in the later part of the decade, Nadir expressed concerns that the market was undervaluing his efforts – while his detractors became increasingly suspicious of Polly Peck's true profitability. When the company collapsed and the SFO investigation proceded, Nadir became a pariah in the establishment circles in which he had been so avidly courted. One of the few public figures to remain sympathetic to him was the Tory MP Michael Mates, who resigned as Northern Ireland minister after a newspaper published a letter he had written to the attorney general complaining about the handing of Nadir's case – and after it became known that he had given the fallen tycoon a watch inscribed 'Don't let the buggers get you down.' Nadir certainly seems to have taken Mates's advice to heart during his long exile in Cyprus, where he lived in heavily guarded luxury and – despite wranglings over his tax affairs – built a new empire of hotel, real estate and media interests, which included newspapers published in Turkish and English and radio and television stations. In 2008 he announced that he had won a contract to run the republic's military airport, Lefkonico, but the British-registered company involved denied any connection with him and the contract was cancelled. In response, Nadir turned his newspapers against the Republican Turkish Party-led coalition government, and promptly found himself presented with a £4 million tax demand. Soon afterwards, however, the coalition was swept out of power in a general election, and Nadir was awarded the airport contract by the new National Unity Party government (which his papers had supported) after a tender in which he was the only bidder, despite doubts as to whether any of his businesses were capable of undertaking the task. But Nadir's wealth and connections could not diminish the embarrassment he represented to a regime that longed for international respectability (and whose sponsor, Turkey, aspired to join the EU). The risk that the Cypriot authorities might one day decide to hand him over to the British prompted Nadir into offering to return to London if he could be assured that he would be freed on bail while his case was heard. His lawyers duly struck a deal, and Nadir's very public return – he installed himself and his family in a rented Mayfair mansion – was conducted more in the style of an exiled head of state than of a businessman who had left his creditors in the lurch. If Nadir's showmanship and self-belief never left him, neither did his roving eye, at home and abroad: when he travelled the world by private jet in his heyday, staff were dispatched to find girls to entertain him in his cabin at each refuelling stop. In the catalogue of Polly Peck's assets in bankruptcy was a fleet of BMWs kept for the use of what the financial columnist Christopher Fildes memorably described as 'ladies who might have been consultants'. Asil Nadir married first, during his student days, Aysegul Tecimer, the daughter of an Istanbul businessman. They had a son, but divorced in the early 1970s; they continued to live together, however, at least some of the time, and when Aysegul became pregnant with a second son they remarried, only to divorce again soon afterwards. Both sons were educated at Eton and Nadir remained close to Aysegul, who continued to host parties for him and to act informally as his ambassadress in Turkey. In 2005, after a brief courtship, he married as his second wife Nur, a student intern in his media company, 43 years his junior, who was swiftly promoted to vice president, announcing that 'we decide the strategy together'. She also looked after their menagerie of dogs and parrots (two of the latter were called Polly and Peck). In 2013 Nur was reported to be seeking divorce – but the marriage endured and they had a son and a daughter. She survives him with the four children of his marriages and two more by other relationships. Asil Nadir, born May 1 1941, died February 9 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.

Asil Nadir, Polly Peck tycoon turned fugitive, dies aged 83
Asil Nadir, Polly Peck tycoon turned fugitive, dies aged 83

The Guardian

time10-02-2025

  • Business
  • The Guardian

Asil Nadir, Polly Peck tycoon turned fugitive, dies aged 83

Turkish Cypriot businessman Asil Nadir, once a fugitive from justice for stealing millions from his British Polly Peck conglomerate, has died, a social media post by his wife said. He was 83. The news was confirmed to the Times newspaper by his British lawyer Giles Bark-Jones. Nadir was being treated at a hospital in the breakaway Turkish Cypriot enclave in northern Cyprus and died overnight, Turkish media reported hospital officials as saying. Once one of Britain's richest men and a Conservative party donor, Nadir was accused of stealing from Polly Peck – a fruits-to-electronics conglomerate that had a meteoric rise in the 1980s – to fund a lavish lifestyle including purchases of antiques, racehorses and country houses. Nadir fled Britain in 1993 on a private jet before the start of his trial for the northern Cyprus enclave, which has no extradition treaty with Britain and is not generally recognised internationally. He spent the next 17 or so years mainly living under the radar at a secluded villa overlooking the Mediterranean in northern Cyprus, occasionally courting media on his claims of innocence and that he would never get a fair trial in Britain. Nadir voluntarily returned to Britain in 2010, vowing to clear his name. But in 2012, Nadir was convicted by a British court of plundering millions 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, in 2016, he applied to serve the remainder of his term in Turkey. After his transfer there, he was released after one night in jail. In its heyday, Polly Peck was the top performing stock on the London Stock Exchange. Nadir was feted by Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives as a major donor and he was a frequent visitor to Downing Street. It was one of Britain's biggest corporate failures, leaving thousands of shareholders and employees out of pocket. Some saw its rapid rise and fall emblematic of the excesses of the 1980s and a precursor to future financial crises. Nadir had admitted to taking money from Polly Peck, but insisted he always balanced the books by paying money into other parts of the business. Born in 1941 in Lefke, Cyprus, Nadir began selling newspapers on the streets aged six, before moving with his family to London. His big break came after the Turkish Cypriot administration invited him to take over crop export plants on fertile orchards seized from displaced Greek Cypriots in the 1970s. In Cyprus, Nadir had interests in real estate and a media group, which he sold in 2022. A bank he chaired, Kibris Endustri Bank, was seized by Turkish Cypriot banking authorities in 2002, one of several in a financial crisis which rattled the tiny enclave. A charismatic figure, Nadir was revered in his native north Cyprus as a generous benefactor to the community, a breakaway state isolated from most countries except Turkey. But he also had enemies in the Greek Cypriot community, who accused him of cashing in on fruit crops on land seized in ethnically split Cyprus, which was divided after a Turkish invasion in 1974 following a brief Greek-inspired coup. With Reuters

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