Vestey, Edmund Hoyle (1932-2007)

Edmund Vestey inherited control of one of the largest family businesses in the world, an empire based on meat that stretched from South America to China. The fortune was made by Vestey’s grandfather, Edmund, and his brother William, who in the early decades of the 20th century were among the earliest to exploit the potential of refrigeration. They used refrigerated ships and portside cold stores to bring meat from the Argentine pampas to an increasingly affluent British middle class.
The Vestey’s built up a highly integrated network of companies that controlled the supply of meat from the pampas to the high street. Their ranches in South America, Australia and New Zealand were served by Vestey-owned packing companies and shipping lines, which brought meat to the family’s wholesalers and then to retailers, notably Dewhurst’s butchers in Britain. Ownership has remained evenly divided between descendants of the original brothers, with Vestey sharing control with his second cousin, Lord Vestey.
Edmund Hoyle Vestey was born in 1932 arid educated at Eton, before taking up a commission in the Queen’s Bays. Vestey’s father, Ronald, had taken over the business, despite being a fourth son, and Vestey was given little choice about his own career.
He served as a director of several companies before being put in charge of the Blue Star Line in 1971. He stayed in this role for 25 years, a turbulent period during which he introduced containerisation and other innovations in the teeth of militant trade union opposition. he was president of the General Council of British Shipping, 1981-82, and was press-ganged back into the role, at what was now the Chamber of Shipping, in 1992. He served for two years, during which time he spoke against the Government’s failure to do anything to reverse the decline of British shipping.
With a fortune conservatively estimated at £1.4 billion at its peak, the family was often described as the richest in Britain, the Windsors excepted. Like the Windsors, however, the Vesteys had to put up with public outcry over their tax arrangements, when it was revealed in 1980 that they had paid almost no tax in the previous 60 years.
Much of the family fortune was tied up in a trust established by the founders in Paris in 1921, and a loophole in the law allowed their descendants to avoid tax, perfectly legally, on money paid by overseas trusts. “We paid exactly what we were obliged to pay,” Vestey said. “We have certainly kept to the letter of the law.” He was also quoted as saying “Let’s face it, nobody pays more tax than they have to. We’re all tax dodgers, aren’t we?”
The press was outraged, though the Vesteys were backed by the Conservative Party chairman, Lord Thorneycroft, who said that the family had created significant wealth and employment for the country. The loophole was eventually closed.
In the 1980s the family diversified “to dip our toes into an awful lot of waters”, as Vestey put it. They moved into pharmaceuticals, using glands taken from the animals they owned, and acquired a perfume company to make use of the musk they produced.
But they also invested in property at the height of the boom and made heavy losses in the recession that followed. By 1991 Union International, one of the main Vestey companies was in serious trouble. Vestey put his eldest son, Tim, in charge and a chief executive was brought in from Lonrho.
The severe cost-cutting and asset sales that resulted caused friction within the family, and Vestey had his son removed in early 1995. Later in the year the company was abruptly put into receivership, with Dewhurst’s sold to a management buyout. Although this was a severe blow to the family fortunes it hardly left them destitute. The Vesteys bought many of their subsidiary operations from the receivers and in recent years their wealth has been estimated at about £800 million.
Vestey continued to run the Vestey Group, commuting to London every day from Suffolk, where he committed himself to country life, he was master of  Thurlow foxhounds, as well as owning a 100,000 acre estate in Scotland. He served as chairman of the Masters of Foxhounds Association, 1992-96, during which time he sought to stave off opponents of bloodsports by introducing a code of conduct for hunts and making an extensive effort to promote the part played by hunting in rural life.
A deeply religious man, Vestey displayed much of the Presbyterian work ethic and frugality of the business’s founders (of whom Phillip Knightley wrote in his book The Rise and Fall of the House of Vestey: “They did not live on the income, they did not live on the interest from their investment; they live on the interest on the interest,”)
Unlike his cousin Lord Vestey, who was often seen in society and played polo with the Prince of Wales, Vestey was a shy man who did not spend ostentatiously, he regarded wealth with the disdain of the traditional landed classes: “There is jolly little security in money. Security is in a home. All that money means is that you can have some nice pictures on the wall,”
His wife, Anne, whom he married in 1960, died last year. He is survived by their four sons. 

Edmund Vestey, businessman,
was born on June 19, 1932. He died of cancer on November 23, 2007, aged 75

From: The Times 30/11/2007

Edmund Vestey, who died on November 23 aged 75, was the third-generation leader of a dynasty which amassed a colossal fortune in the meat trade as ranchers, importers and retail butchers.

A dedicated countryman with extensive estates in East Anglia and Scotland, he was also chairman of the Masters of Foxhounds Association at a time in the early 1990s when the future of hunting was first seen to be seriously imperilled by a future Labour government.

Edmund Vestey was a grandson of another Edmund who, with his brother William, founded the Union Cold Storage company in Liverpool in 1897. William had earlier worked in the Chicago stockyards, and the pair brought bold new ideas to their family's traditional Victorian butchery business.

They saw the potential for canned products using cuts that would otherwise be thrown away; and pioneered refrigerated shipments of fresh meat from South America, and later from the Antipodes.

The brothers believed firmly in vertical integration, eventually coming to own a vast conglomerate of interests from estancias and processing plants in Argentina and ranches in Australia as big as English counties to the JH Dewhurst chain of British high street butchers - and the Blue Star shipping line which brought the meat to them across the oceans.

They also imported eggs in vast quantities (from China) as well as meat, and during the First World War the Vesteys were credited with keeping the nation supplied with protein. The founding brothers acquired a baronetcy apiece (followed in William's case, in 1922, by a peerage) and also felt their service to national commerce and nourishment entitled them to special dispensation from taxes - an objective which they achieved very efficiently, but by means which came back to haunt later generations of the family.

Edmund Hoyle Vestey was born on June 19 1932, the son of Ronald Vestey, a business autocrat who, after his father and uncle retired, controlled every detail of the family empire down to the arrangement of meat cuts in Dewhursts' shop displays, and expanded it with great success in the years before the Second World War. The young Edmund was educated at Eton and was commissioned in the Queen's Bays in 1951, later serving as a territorial officer in the City of London Yeomanry.

On leaving the regular Army he joined the family business at its austere headquarters in Smithfield, and in 1971 became chairman of the Blue Star line, a post he held for 25 years and in which he was much involved in dealing with the militant union actions which repeatedly disrupted the shipping industry in the 1970s.

He was president of the General Chamber of British Shipping in 1981-82, but some eyebrows were raised by his taking up that appointment, because it followed not long after revelations in a Sunday newspaper of a complex tax-avoidance scheme (through an overseas trust of which the records were held in Uruguay) that had protected the family coffers for the previous 60 years, enabling some of their British-based businesses to pay almost no tax at all.

A revenue official was famously supposed to have described dealing with the Vesteys' tax affairs as "like trying to squeeze a rice pudding". The arrangements were entirely legal, but nevertheless there was brief public uproar when they were uncovered. Faced with the allegation of being a tax-dodger, the publicity-shy Edmund - often described as a deeply religious workaholic, in contrast to his polo-playing, party-going second cousin, Lord (Sam) Vestey - responded: "Let's face it, nobody pays more tax than they have to… I believe that it has been to the benefit of this country." The loophole was eventually closed in 1991.

At their zenith the Vesteys were thought to be worth upwards of £2 billion: they had 23,000 employees and owned 250,000 head of cattle on several continents. But in the recession of the early 1990s their fortunes began to turn down. Their main London operating company, Union International, of which leadership passed from Edmund to his eldest son Timothy in 1991, had invested heavily in the property boom, and was £430 million in debt to its bankers, while the meat businesses were rapidly diminishing in profitability.

With the assistance of hired-in professional managers, Tim Vestey embarked on a radical program of restructuring and disposals, but the financial situation continued to deteriorate amid increasing family rancour.

In early 1995 Edmund engineered Tim's removal from power and gave control of the key family holding company, Western United, to two of his younger sons, Robin and George; but shortly afterwards Union International went into administration and the Dewhurst chain had to be sold off, as was the Blue Star shipping line.

Nevertheless the family retained extensive private business interests, and continued to register in the upper stratum of annual Rich Lists. The Vestey Group, of which Edmund was a director from 1993 to 2000, held a substantial portfolio of international property and farming assets, some of which had been bought back advantageously from the troubled Union International.

Edmund's personal holdings included the Thurlow estate in Suffolk, where he and his wife were for many years joint masters of the Thurlow foxhounds, regularly hunting two days a week over what he called "good East Anglian plough".

In Scotland he owned a wilderness sporting estate in Sutherland, acquired by the family in the 1930s and originally extending to more than 100,000 acres - though a large portion of it, including the mountains of Suilven and Canisp, was sold off under the pressure of the devolved Scottish administration's land reforms amidst a certain amount of public criticism of the Vesteys' stewardship. Edmund also owned farmland in the Borders, where his fourth son, James, was master of the Jedforest hunt.

Given Edmund Vestey's reticence in the public spotlight, it was with a sense of painful duty that he took on the chairmanship of the Masters of Foxhounds Association early in 1992, at a time when Labour was expected imminently to win a general election and impose a hunting ban.

An interviewer described him at the time as having "something of a jockey's build, small-framed and wiry", and looking none the worse for having recently cracked a couple of ribs after falling off his cob and "meeting a telegraph pole".

His quiet, courteous manner was in contrast to some of his more belligerent peers in the hunting field, but concealed a steely determination to appeal to public commonsense over the heads of politicians and make hunting "safe for future generations".

He was also well aware that the sport needed to keep its own house in order: under his four-year chairmanship the Association adopted a new code of conduct which, inter alia, prohibited the digging out of foxes that have run to ground, and set clearer rules for hunt followers, mounted or otherwise.

Edmund Vestey was High Sheriff of Essex in 1977 and was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant of Essex in 1978 and of Suffolk in 1991. He married, in 1960, Anne Scoones, whom he had met in New Zealand, where her father, General Sir Geoffrey Scoones, was British high commissioner. They had four sons.

From: Daily Telegraph 29/11/2007