The joke in Westminster is that Gordon Brown wanted to prolong his bounce, so
he poached a tennis equipment tycoon from the Tories. But if the prime
minister wanted to burnish his green credentials, he could hardly have done
better than sign up Johan Eliasch, a multi-millionaire who owns a rainforest
and is enlisting the masses to save the planet.
Last week the Anglo-Swedish businessman turned his back on 4½ years as the
Conservatives’ deputy treasurer and became the third prominent Tory to be
welcomed into Brown’s big “wigwam”. After complaining of Cameron’s “lurch to
the right” he jumped ship to advise Brown’s government on deforestation and
green energy.
It is a subject on which the 45-year-old chief executive of the Head sports
equipment company is unusually qualified. Last year he bought 400,000 acres
of rainforest north of the Madeira River, a tributary of the Amazon, where
dolphins swim alongside piranhas. He purchased the estate for an estimated
£8m from a logging company to protect the plants and wildlife. “The Amazon
is the lung of the world,” he proclaimed.
Although Cameron quickly fought back, declaring he would not be diverted from
his agenda, the loss of Eliasch will be felt keenly – not least because he
has lent the Tories £2.6m and expects to be repaid. He’s in no hurry: the
businessman has amassed a £360m fortune, making him the joint 211th richest
person in Britain, according to The Sunday Times Rich List. Over the years
he has lent his private jet to Tory leaders, including Iain Duncan Smith,
and was an adviser on IDS’s think tank, the Centre for Social Justice.
Political defections are a bit like adultery, one political commentator wrote
last week. In this respect, Eliasch and his exotic wife Amanda are quite
relaxed, according to reports of their open marriage. When not at their
five-storey Belgravia mansion with the couple’s two children, he spends time
in São Paulo with the Brazilian beauty Ana Paula Junqueira, while she sees
the London cosmetic surgeon Dr Jean-Louis Sebagh.
“We have loved each other for 20 years, but we are completely different
people,” the Beirut-born photographer, whose exhibition of nudes attracted
brief notoriety, said of her marriage last year. “Yes, I am still going out
with Dr Sebagh. And yes, Johan is still with his girlfriend. So what? I
don’t believe in divorce.”
By one account, Eliasch was wooed for Labour by Jack Straw, the justice
secretary, aboard the tycoon’s yacht off the Italian coast, with the siren
argument that he could do more for the environment from within government
than in opposition. Eliasch is said to have called the minister a fortnight
later to spell out his disenchantment with Cameron.
But he masked his intentions with a series of swerves that might have owed
something to his prowess as a skier in the world cup and downhill
championships. When his dissatisfaction emerged on Monday, shadow chancellor
George Osborne remained under the impression that Eliasch was “a committed
Conservative” who would remain a party supporter and financier.
His stated reason for resignation was that he wanted to spend more time
working on climate change and with his environmental pressure group Cool
Earth, which gives individuals and groups the chance to fund rainforest
protection on a large scale. However, within days he was unveiled as Brown’s
latest recruit. Yes, he would allow his Tory membership to lapse even though
he would not join Labour.
He followed in the footsteps of Patrick Mercer, the dismissed Tory homeland
security spokesman who will advise Brown on security, and John Bercow, a
former shadow cabinet member who is to head a government review of services
for children with communication difficulties. One explanation for this
exodus is that Cameron lacks the relentless schmoozing power deployed by
Anji Hunter and Peter Mandelson during Tony Blair’s early ascendancy.
A thin, lanky man bristling with nervous energy, Eliasch is in the habit of
surprising his friends. “He’s a classic money man – he always wants to bank
on a winner,” said one acquaintance. “He likes to dabble in politics but
he’s very conscious of how things will play out commercially.” He remains a
paradox – formal and slightly stilted in a Swedish way, yet drawn to the
glitz of a jet-set lifestyle. Remember Sven?
This trait was displayed in his friendship with the Duke of York, whom he met
at a charity match he organised at Buckingham Palace between John McEnroe
and Bjorn Borg, a fellow Swede. The gossip columns catalogued his lavish
entertaining of Prince Andrew on his yacht off the Thai island of Phuket, at
his villa on the French Riviera, and in April at a party in Brazil featuring
a throng of beautiful women.
Perhaps the high life is overcompensation for his rather glum childhood, when
his happiest times were the four months of winter when he could ski to
school in Stockholm. “I’d wake up, struggle with clumsy bindings and set off
on a journey that should take 10 minutes but I’d stretch to half an hour,”
he recalled.
He was born into a wealthy dynasty, mindful of the pitfalls of inherited
wealth. His maternal grandfather, a Swedish industrialist who built the
corporate empire, stipulated in his will that none of his descendants could
inherit until they were 50. That left Eliasch with a challenge.
His parents were both doctors who recognised his commercial instincts at an
early age. “My father didn’t particularly want me to be a doctor,” he said.
“Business was what I had always wanted to do. I had been buying shares since
I was 12.”
After studying engineering at Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology, and
economics and business administration at Stockholm University, he spent a
year as a trainee at the German electronics conglomerate Siemens. He went to
New York and raised enough cash to buy into a small cards company, which he
reshuffled and sold on to make a quick profit. “I suppose I had been groomed
to work in a big company. But when it came to it, I found it was not really
what I wanted for myself.”
Determined to make his fortune, in 1985 he arrived in London and with partners
set up the Tufton group, specialising in raising money to buy companies,
restructure them and sell them on. A disagreement over the firm’s direction
led him to quit in 1991.
His friendship with Charles and Maurice Saatchi, Margaret Thatcher’s ad men,
was forged when he established a private investment company called Equity
Partners. When they launched a breakaway agency, it was Eliasch who brokered
the peace deal with their former firm.
One of his first purchases was London Films, the production company
established by Sir Alexander Korda. It was the beginning of his sideline as
a producer, notably of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, directed for television by
Ken Russell and starring Joely Richardson and Sean Bean. He also produced
the 1999 television series The Scarlet Pimpernel.
Eliasch had been stalking the Austrian sports company Head Tyrolia Mares,
started by Howard Head in 1950. By the mid1980s it had fallen on hard times,
but it eluded his grasp when it was put up for sale twice. In 1995, by
promising to revive the brand, he gained control for a token £600,000. “I
could see that it was a fantastic brand, with very high awareness in the
sports goods market,” he said.
Deciding Head’s range was too wide, he lopped it back to tennis and skiing
gear while retaining Mares diving equipment and San Marco shoes. His two
innovations won rapid popularity – carving skis and tennis rackets made of
titanium and graphite (Blair attempted to raise his game with a Head
racket).
The group’s success and Eliasch’s wealth enabled him to donate £20m to
environmental causes, putting him in 10th place on this year’s Sunday Times
Giving Index. He also found time, as a scratch golfer, to play in qualifying
rounds of the Open championship and become a trophy-winning curler.
Eliasch is critical of political inertia. “Not a day goes by without political
statements on emission targets and Kyoto protocols,” he said. “Every MP
seems sure that global warming is the number one priority on their ‘to do’
list. Unfortunately, a ‘to do’ list won’t avert a global crisis. Like so
many people, I despair of debate ever leading to effective action. This
prompted me to leapfrog a debate with action.”
Will his views carry any weight after the reverberations of Brown’s coup have
died down? As Eliasch knows, a tree transplanted from one part of the forest
to another does not always take root.
