NICOSIA (Reuters) – 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.
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.
(Writing by Michele Kambas; Editing by Daren Butler, Angus MacSwan and Edwina Gibbs)
