Asil Nadir

Nadir was born in 1941 in Lefka, Cyprus. His father, Irfan Nadir, was a local businessman and police constable in the colonial police department. When he was six years old, he began selling newspapers, and he moved with his family to London in the 1950s when his father expanded the family clothing business from a base in the East End of London.

Nadir studied economics at Istanbul University, but returned to Cyprus before graduation to set up a clothing business. He returned to London in the 1960s, but after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, accepted the appeal of the de facto authorities to bolster the new region economically. The Turkish occupation enabled him to take over a Greek-Cypriot owned clothing factory in Nicosia, where he greatly expanded exports to the Middle East.

Polly Peck

In the late 1970s he purchased a small British textile company, Polly Peck, which he turned into a portfolio company with which to make various corporate raiding purchases in clothing, fruit packing and later consumer electronics. Through this he came to prominence in the 1980s as a tycoon and the CEO of an organisation by then with over 24,000 shareholders and interests ranging from produce to electronics. Within a decade, Nadir had built Peck from almost nothing into a member of the FTSE 100.

His criminal mismanagement led to its collapse in 1990.

Nadir was born to a Turkish Cypriot family. He was the father of five children, one by his mistress when aged 19, two by his first wife, one by a former mistress, and one by his second wife, Nur. Nadir was listed at 36th on the Sunday Times Rich List in 1990.

Nadir died in a hospital in North Nicosia on 6 February 2025, at the age of 83.