Britain’s Serious Fraud Office said it had worked out bail conditions with Nadir’s lawyers including a 250,000 pound surety, a ban on travel and the requirement that he hand over his passport and other travel documents. The office said that Nadir would also be fitted with an electronic monitoring device and barred from coming within the vicinity of an airport, seaport, or London’s St. Pancras station, the terminus of Eurostar trains from Paris.
Nadir, the son of a wealthy Cypriot, came to England in the 1960s and set up an east London clothing company which grew into an international conglomerate. In 1980, he took control of the ailing British textile company Polly Peck and used the firm as his stock market vehicle for expansion. The company’s stock price multiplied as Nadir went on an acquisitions binge, snapping up Del Monte’s fresh fruit operations and Japan’s Sansui Electric Co. Nadir became one of Britain’s richest people in the process, but his company’s share price collapsed after investigators began probing irregularities in Nadir family trusts.
Nadir denied charges he had stolen from Polly Peck to line his pockets, insisting he was the victim of a Greek-inspired political conspiracy. His company filed for bankruptcy protection in late 1990, hundreds of millions of pounds (dollars) in debt. Nadir fled the country in May of 1993, four months before he was scheduled to face trial, escaping to France in a private jet before making his way back to northern Cyprus. The scandal over Polly Peck’s collapse was one in a series of British business debacles that focused attention on the financial freewheeling and corporate greed of the 1980s. Others included the 1991 BCCI banking scandal and the demise of Maxwell media empire.
The affair also had serious repercussions for the Conservative Party when its links to Nadir were revealed. Michael Mates, an aide to then-Prime Minister John Major, was forced to resign after it was shown he’d given Nadir a watch inscribed with a profane reference to the tycoon’s accusers. Speaking to Sky, Nadir declined to say whether he would support the Conservative Party in the future. “We’ve got a little injustice to sort out first,” he said. Any possible trial is expected to be complex. A spokesman for the Serious Fraud Office said that while the case was some 20 years old and that the files had since been consigned to the archive, some of those involved in the initial investigation would be tapped to provide “direct, hands-on knowledge.”
