Milk carton billionaire whose life was blighted by tragedy
HAnS Rausing – the reclusive, Swedish-born head of a clan touched by fabulous wealth and great tragedy – has died at the age of 93 at his East Sussex home.
The son of the man credited with inventing the TetraPak food container, he helped transform the family’s small Scandinavian packaging business in to a global colossus, before emigrating to Britain to avoid the punitive taxes of his native land.
The UK would become a principal beneficiary of decades of quiet philanthropy by Rausing and his family who, between them, are believed to have given away at least £1billion of the family fortune.
A giant of a man in so many ways (he was 6ft 8in), his generosity to a wide range of charitable causes was recognised by the award of an honorary knighthood in 2006.
However, he preferred to be known as ‘Professor’, the honorary accolade awarded by an obscure Russian university ten years earlier.
Though the father-of-three never sought publicity – indeed, he usually went out of his way to avoid it – the family was periodically propelled into the headlines by the behaviour of his only son, Hans Kristian (known as Hans K).
In 2008, the wayward heir’s wife, Eva, was arrested after being caught with quantities of crack cocaine and heroin while entering the US Embassy in London. Larger amounts were then found at the couple’s Belgravia home, and they received a police caution.
‘I have made a serious mistake which I very much regret,’ Eva declared afterwards. ‘I consider myself to have taken a wrong turn in the course of my life.’ Though the couple were generous donors to charities dealing with addiction, tragedy struck four years later.
With his four children in the custody of an aunt, Hans junior was arrested on suspicion of drug offences. Subsequent police enquiries led to the discovery of Eva’s decomposing body at their home. He was given a suspended sentence for delaying her burial.
Family friends suggested that a lifetime spent in the shadow of a supremely successful father had contributed to the downfall of the son.
The story of the Rausings’ phenomenal wealth began in the winter of 1944 when a Swedish economist called Ruben Rausing was watching his wife Elisabeth making sausages at home in the university town of Lund, Sweden.
Observing the way in which the sausages were kept fresh in the membrane of a skin pressed shut at each end, he had an idea.
Ruben would go on to apply the same principles to creating a low cost, germfree alternative to the milk bottle out of a sealed cardboard rectangle. The result would lead to a packaging revolution involving almost every liquid product on every continent.
The tale of Ruben’s eureka moment over the kitchen table in Lund has entered Swedish – and industrial – folklore.
YET, it later transpired that much of the credit was due to a young Swedish scientist. Ruben had been a brilliant scholar at university and had already set up a packaging business selling household items like flour and sugar in small units. By the time he saw Elizabeth making her sausages, he had a small team of scientists on the payroll and asked one of them, Erik Wallenberg, to devise his new container.
‘I was under a lot of pressure to find a solution but strangely it was while I was at home with flu that I came up with what was to be the basis of the tetrahedron-shaped milk package,’ Wallenberg said later. Ruben paid him £300 for his work – half a year’s wages – and registered the patent.
Ruben’s two elder sons, Hans and Gad, would go on to join a company that had started to diversify into a broad range of products. Like his father, Hans was the one with a flair for business.
A turning point came in the Sixties when the family sold the whole business and then bought back the TetraPak part of the company by itself. By the Eighties, with the brothers running the show on their own, Sweden’s tax regime proved too much for the Rausings. Attracted by the new entrepreneurial climate under Margaret Thatcher, they moved to the UK.
Gad preferred London while Hans bought the Wadhurst Park estate in East Sussex, building up an extensive deer herd (and a special tower from which to shoot some of them).
With a stuffed wolf in his front hall, he was an eccentric figure, preferring an old Timex watch to a Rolex and driving around in an old Morris Minor, even though he had amassed a very substantial collection of vintage cars.
Having sold his 50 per cent stake in the company to Gad for £3.5billion in 1993, Hans and wife Marit (whom he married in 1958) started giving away chunks of their fortune in earnest.
He built up his art collection and acquired a wild boar farm in neighbouring Kent while bestowing substantial trust funds on his three children. The eldest, Lisbet, is a noted academic with degrees from the University of California and Harvard. The second daughter, Dr Sigrid Rausing, has become a well-known publisher and editor of the literary magazine, Granta.
Hans junior, meanwhile, now tries to lead a life of quiet anonymity having remarried to Julia Delves-Broughton in 2014.
Last night, all three children issued a joint statement paying tribute to the man who called himself ‘the perfect salesman’: ‘Our father was an extraordinary man, achieving so many things in his long and distinguished career.’
And all thanks to a string of sausages and a sheet of cardboard 75 years ago...