ASIL NADIR, the Turkish Cypriot businessman and UK Conservative Party donor at the centre of one of Britain’s biggest fraud trials, was found guilty yesterday of a further seven charges of theft.
That takes to 10 the total number of counts on which a jury at the Old Bailey in London has convicted Mr Nadir, following guilty verdicts on three theft charges on Monday.
The 10 charges together represent theft of nearly £29 million (€37 million). He was cleared by the jury on three charges. The judge is expected to pass sentence today. The crimes of which Mr Nadir has been convicted carry a maximum sentence of seven years in prison.
It is an ignominious end to the career of one of the most high-profile entrepreneurs of the 1980s.
Mr Nadir became a household name for his transformation of a small textiles company in London’s East End into Polly Peck International, a multinational conglomerate spanning electronics, leisure and the Del Monte fruit group. He had been due to stand trial in 1993, but fled Britain in May that year on a private aircraft bound for northern Cyprus. He returned to Britain in 2010 and denied all the charges against him.
Responding to yesterday’s verdicts, David Green, director of Britain’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO), which prosecuted the case, said Mr Nadir’s conviction of “theft on a grand scale” from a public company 19 years after he fled the UK was “a remarkable achievement”.
The jury of seven men and three women, who sat for seven months hearing the case against the 71-year-old, had been deliberating for nine days over the 13 charges of alleged theft totalling £33.1 million and $2.5 million (€2 million) from Polly Peck International between 1987 and 1990.
However, the jury was told at the start of the trial that these were specimen charges and the overall amount was alleged to be nearer £146 million.
The prosecution told the jury that Mr Nadir wielded considerable power over Polly Peck’s operations and management and that of its subsidiaries, particularly carton packaging group Unipac in northern Cyprus. “We say he abused that power and helped himself to tens of millions of pounds of Polly Peck’s money,” Philip Shears, representing the SFO, had told the court.
At the heart of the prosecution case were a series of transfers to Turkish and northern Cypriot subsidiaries of Polly Peck.
The court heard allegations that Mr Nadir caused transfers of money from three Polly Peck bank accounts “which he dishonestly routed away to benefit himself, his family or associates” and in fact “stole Polly Peck International’s money”.
The jury also heard that Mr Nadir used £4 million of “stolen” money to buy real estate for himself and his relatives including £2 million which was put towards a country mansion worth £7 million.
Prosecutors claim that a further £1.9 million which was “taken dishonestly” from Polly Peck was used as a deposit for a central London office by a company linked to Mr Nadir, although the purchase was never completed.
Polly Peck, which grew rapidly in the 1980s into an international conglomerate with food, leisure and textile operations, collapsed into administration in 1990.
The original investigation into Mr Nadir was an embarrassment for the Conservatives, in power at the time. Mr Nadir is alleged to have given more than £400,000 to the party. Michael Mates, the former Tory MP who had to resign from John Major’s government after giving Mr Nadir a watch inscribed “Don’t let the buggers get you down”, gave evidence on behalf of the defence.
The Conservative Party said it would “study” the judgment, but pointed out it has no record of receiving donations from Mr Nadir himself.
