Hans Rausing

Hans Rausing, the reclusive Swedish industrialist, is one of Britain's most charitable donors, having given away over £146m in the last few years. He has also given £343,000 to the Conservative Party over the past two years, providing financial support for the office of Oliver Letwin, who is in charge of David Cameron's policy reviews.

Based in Wadhurst, East Sussex, Rausing is a tax exile who helped develop the Tetra Pak (later Tetra Laval) operation founded by his late father in 1944. It revolutionised the packaging of products such as milk and juices. In the early 1980s, he moved to Britain to escape Sweden's punitive tax regime and sold his 50% stake in the company to his late brother Gad, for around £4.4bn in 1995.

Since then he has been investing heavily in new products such as Ecolean, the new environmentally-friendly packaging material made from chalk. Having taken control of the Swedish-based firm in 2000, it is a coup for Rausing that Marks & Spencer is now using Ecolean to wrap a range of its own-label butters. It follows a decision by Carrefour, the French supermarket operation, to use Ecolean in all its stores. But Ecolean will require more of the Rausing millions, having chalked up losses in 2003 and 2004. It recently laid off thirty staff as well. Rausing has also invested in a Swedish crystal company and bizarrely a Ukrainian ketchup maker.

Rausing's charitable trusts have also given enormous sums to charity of at least £20m a year but usually around £40m annually. Last year, among the donations by the Marit andHans Rausing Charitable Foundation was a £1.5m grant to a Swedish University medical faculty to research treatments for brain tumours.

It is not just Rausing who is generous to charitable causes. His London-based daughter, Lisbet, supports the conservation charity, Fauna and Flora International, where she is a vice president. She also helps conserve the golden eagle at her 48,000 acre Scottish Highland estate where she is spending upwards of £20m on a new and extraordinary granite house. Her donations to charity and worthy causes will soon reach £15m a year. Her sister Sigrid, the youngest daughter of Hans, also has a Scottish estate from where she is waging a battle against a wind farm proposed on Sir Jack Hayward's (q.v.) neighbouring estate.

The hefty investments and the increasing charitable work will have limited the growth in the Rausing fortune. Cautiously we value the Rausing family at £5.4bn, which is mid-point between the valuations in the 2006 Swedish rich list in Veckans Affarer and the figure in Forbes" recent list of world billionaires.