After King Midas rid himself of his golden touch, a second curse made him
resemble an ass. The Tetra Pak billionaire Hans Rausing must have sensed a
similar malediction last week on learning that Hans Kristian, his son, and
Eva, his American daughter-in-law, had been arrested in a drug search of
partygoers at the US embassy in London.
The 81-year-old Swedish patriarch, despite being the third richest man in
Britain, has always been a model of frugality and discretion. Yet here was
his son, a former hippie who had enjoyed the fruits of the old man’s £5.4
billion fortune, being splashed all over the newspapers after the embassy’s
security guards allegedly found several wraps of class A drugs in Eva’s
handbag on Tuesday.
In a further indignity, police searched Hans Kristian’s £5m home in Chelsea,
west London, and reportedly found £2,000 worth of drugs. Arrested on
suspicion of possessing heroin and crack cocaine, the couple, both 44, were
later bailed to return in July.
Eva, who is friendly with the Prince of Wales and supports one of his
charities, appeared on her doorstop the next day to admit she had taken a
“wrong turn” in life and to apologise to friends and family for the “upset”
she had caused, vowing to seek “help that I very much need”.
Other than the mention of crack cocaine - a drug associated more with council
estates than a millionaires’ row off Cadogan Square - none of this came as a
great surprise to those familiar with the couple’s personalities and
problems.
“Hans K is a recluse of almost Howard Hughes proportions, gentle and painfully
shy, while Eva is a party animal and very gregarious,” said a regular
acquaintance. “He is a big bear of a man, while she’s quite birdlike.”
On Hans K’s rare sallies from home to attend dinner parties, his silences can
disconcert guests. “He’ll just sit there quietly all night long,” said one.
“Direct questions to him just get batted to Eva.
"He’s a blank canvas - monosyllabic and vacant. No one seems to get to know
him and he doesn’t appear to have any friends.”
He is said to have no hobbies to speak of and spends a lot of time watching
television. In 2002 he enlivened his routine by purchasing a sumptuous
apartment on the £182m luxury cruise liner The World, which perpetually
roams the seas like the Mary Celeste.
By contrast, Eva’s flamboyance is well known to those on the party circuit.
According to an observer of high society: “She’s always been off her head,
dancing wildly - sometimes on the tables. She’s a striking figure:
incredibly thin and always dressed in the most amazing outfits that money
can buy. At parties there’s never any sign of her husband.”
The couple’s frequent refuge is Barbados, where they have recently completed a
house with about 12 acres of beach front estimated to be worth £50m. A
visitor said: “Although the house is surrounded by high walls, Hans K didn’t
want anyone overlooking it, so he bought all the land on the other side of
the road and turned it into a walled garden.
“When he’s in Barbados he rarely comes out of his room, which is the size of a
hotel suite. There’s a separate wing for the children, to keep them out of
the way, with full-time nannies for the children of guests, too. As a couple
they seem to spend a lot of time going between Chelsea, rehab and Barbados.”
This lifestyle of servants, chauffeurs and conspicuous wealth is anathema to
Rausing Sr, son of the Swedish industrialist who invented the laminated
cardboard carton that conquered the world. He cooks for himself and is never
happier than spending summer holidays at a fisherman’s cottage in Sweden. An
eccentric figure, whose 6ft 8in stature and mental toughness are said to
have overawed his son, the packaging tycoon keeps a stuffed wolf in the
conservatory of his home in Wadhurst, East Sussex, and breeds deer and wild
boar on the 3,000-acre estate. Celebrated locally for driving around in a
battered Morris Minor, which he finally swapped for a 12-year-old
Russian-made Lada Niva, he once declared: “Either you have 20 mistresses
covered in diamonds, or you achieve something with your money.”
Philip Beresford, who compiles The Sunday Times Rich List, says the
octogenarian billionaire, no longer involved with Tetra Pak, still has “a
razor-sharp brain” and his shrewd investments continue to expand the family
coffers.
“He’s quite Thatcherite in a puritanical sense: he believes in people making
their own way and living within their means,” Beresford said. “He hates
ostentatious displays of wealth. He’s also possibly the most generous
philanthropist, year on year, in this country. I suspect that one of the
issues that has dogged the family is that the son can’t live up to the
father.” Beresford thinks that last week’s scandal may affect Hans K’s
inheritance.
Yet Hans K and Eva have themselves poured money into good works. Prince
Charles has referred to Hans K as “one very special philanthropist”, while
both the Mary Rose Trust and the Royal Opera House have reason to be
grateful for the couple’s munificence.
The main focus of their donations are antiaddiction trusts such as Mentor, the
drugs prevention charity. “If it wasn’t for Mrs Rausing, I’m not sure we
would have stayed afloat,” said Eric Carlin, its chief executive. “She’s a
good woman. She cares.”
According to one acquaintance, the Rausings do not just sign cheques and walk
away, but offer “hands-on” help: “It’s easy to mock rich people who mess up
their lives. But they have confronted their own addictions by putting an
enormous amount of money and time into addiction treatment. They’re people
who appear to be overwhelmed by wealth, which is not such a rare thing.”
Hans K was born and brought up in Lund, southern Sweden, where his father
built Tetra Pak into a worldwide brand. The idea was conceived in 1944 when
Hans K’s grandfather, Ruben, was watching his wife Elizabeth making
sausages. Intrigued by the way she folded over the skin at either end, he
applied the same principle to milk packaging.
Ruben’s sons, Hans and Grad, took over the business, moving to Britain in the
1980s to escape punitive Swedish taxes. In 1996, at the age of 70, Hans sold
his share of the company to his brother.
Unlike Hans K, who is said to lack an aim in life, his older sisters appear to
have reconciled fabulous wealth to meaningful careers. Lisbet, 47, married
to the historian Peter Baldwin, runs the Arcadia Trust, which has donated
£20m to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London to preserve
endangered languages. Sigrid and her husband, the film-maker Eric Abrahams,
are regarded as one of London’s foremost literary power couples. They own
Portobello Books and Granta magazine. The Sigrid Rausing Foundation has
given nearly £70m to human rights projects and environmental causes since
1995. In addition to a house in Holland Park, west London, which has the
biggest private garden outside Buckingham Palace, Sigrid also owns a
Scottish estate of about 40,000 acres.
“The pros of inheriting great wealth, I believe, are largely illusory and can
become pathological,” Sigrid once observed. “An illusory sense of being
special and different . . . and subsequent feelings of isolation.”
Such intimations may have driven Hans K - in his early twenties, without a
career and still a newcomer to Britain - to drop out and follow the hippie
trail to India. It was at a rehab clinic in America that he met Eva, the
daughter of Tom Kemeny, a former Pepsi Cola executive, and they married soon
afterwards.
The Kemenys, who live on an island off the coast of south Carolina, also have
a house in Barbados. At a party there to celebrate the Millennium, Eva’s
sister Be met Jack Kidd, the polo-playing brother of the model Jodie Kidd,
and they married later that year in London. However, the match ended in
acrimony five years later when Be, discovering there were other women in her
husband’s life, e-mailed 200 friends to announce that the marriage was over.
Then she smashed his computer and threw it into a lake.
For many years Rausing Sr has been promoting the virtues of Ecolean, a
biodegradable packaging technology whose time may have come. So the
millstone of wealth may soon weigh heavier than ever on Hans K and Eva as
they come to terms with a secret they have tried to hide from public view
for years.
Virtue is its own reward but only if it breeds virtuous behaviour. Imagine 70 million to human rights! More useful to spend it on cleaning up litter. And educating people to the fact that cocaine is a scourge as bad as some religions.
Emily P, cambridge, UK
Idleness breeds negative behaviour, be it in a Chelsea mansion or an inner city housing estate.
st John Delwes-Cholmondely (Lord), Hingebottom Bay, UK