Lord Vestey

The Vestey name will always be synonymous with meat and controversy over taxation. The family's huge wealth was largely built up by two brothers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. William and Edmund Vestey were both born in Liverpool. Their father, Samuel Vestey, a Yorkshireman by birth, ran a business, buying and selling mainly provisions imported from North America. Both William and Edmund, after an education at the Liverpool Institute, gained experience in the family business.

At the age of seventeen, William was sent to America to buy and ship home goods for his father. Despite his youth, he established a canning factory in Chicago, and purchased the cheaper cuts of meat to make corned beef, which he shipped to Liverpool. This venture was successful, and the management of the cannery was given to Edmund, who had joined the firm in 1883.

Keen to expand the business, William went to Argentina in 1890. Seeing the huge potential for producing meat and other food there, he invested in refrigeration technology to preserve food on the long seaborne voyage across the Atlantic. He began by shipping frozen partridges, and later mutton and beef, from Argentina to Britain. Edmund later joined him and in 1890, the pair established the first cold store in Liverpool, which as the Union Cold Storage Company, was to become one of the world's largest cold storage operations.

The brothers soon diversified into other products, using their extensive network of cold stores to accommodate all types of perishable foodstuffs, and developed their supplies on a worldwide basis. In 1906, they began to ship eggs, chickens, and other produce from China. The China trade led them into another avenue of business, when they purchased two tramp steamers in 1909, and converted them into refrigerated ships. This was the beginning of the Blue Star Line, which they registered in 1911. In the next five years they acquired five more ships, as well as a butchery business, a chain of retail shops in Britain, and small freezing works in Australia and New Zealand. A totally integrated business was established as a result, controlling every stage of the food chain from producer to consumer. During the Great War, the Vesteys' cattle ranches and farms in Argentina were vital for the war effort. It also became their base after the 1914 Finance Act imposed swinging taxes, making the Vestey brothers, in effect, tax exiles.

They returned to Britain in 1919, when William appeared before the royal commission on income tax to argue the need for a return to the pre-1915 tax levels. Unable to convince the government of the validity of their case, in 1921, the Vesteys and their advisers devised a complex and highly successful scheme which not only satisfied their desire to live in Britain and avoid paying any personal tax but also showed them to be as innovative and pioneering in the field of tax avoidances in the food business.

The greater part of the Vesteys' overseas empire was leased to their British company, Union Cold Storage Ltd, for a yearly rent of £960,000, which was used to set up a trust fund in Paris. From the trust the money flowed into the Western United Investment Company in Britain, a Vestey holding company in which the family held the management shares and controlling interest, and thence, tax free, into the pockets of the Vestey brothers.

Once domiciled again in England, Edmund was created a baronet in 1921, and the following year William purchased a peerage from the Lloyd George government, apparently for £25,000. This peerage led to a letter of protest from George V, who felt it wrong that a man who declined to pay national taxes should be so rewarded.

The business prospered after the war and by 1925, Blue Star was the largest refrigerated fleet in the world. In Britain they owned cold stores in several cities as well as 2,365 retail butcher shops. Their operations in Britain were managed from the Union Cold Storage Company Ltd, which had an issued capital of £12m in 1933. The depression did not hamper growth and in 1934, the Vesteys took over the Anglis meat operation in Australia for £1.5m.

When William died in 1940, the business was valued at around £90m. His younger brother Edmund died as chairman in 1953. The family still control the business, though it is now run by professional managers. William's stake at his death was worth perhaps £30m. In today's money that would be around £7.1 bn.