Car tycoon dies on eve of tax hearing

HE WAS a tyrant, a tax cheat and a fugitive from justice. He was also a philanthropist, a freedom fighter and the most formidable of enemies. Octav Botnar, the former chairman of Nissan UK, died in Switzerland on Saturday night and was buried yesterday after a private family funeral in Paris.

His death, at the age of 84, brings to a close one of the most colourful chapters in British corporate history - and one of its longest-running legal feuds.

Yesterday former acquaintances remembered him as a bully and even a monster, but one who was capable of the greatest acts of compassion and generosity. He donated more than pounds 100m to charity while simultaneously defrauding the taxpayer of pounds 300m. He also made donations to the Conservative Party and funded John Major's leadership campaign.

To some he was a philanthropist of the first order. To others he was the Robert Maxwell of the motor industry.

"Like all of us he had his good side and his bad side," said Anthony Fraser, Nissan UK's director of external affairs from 1989 to 1991. "I remember on a number of occasions people would come to him with sob stories and the next thing you knew, he had written a cheque for several hundred thousand pounds. There were no strings attached. He just did it.

"The monster side to his character was that he would not tolerate people who weren't prepared to follow his wishes. If they didn't do as he wanted he would force them to and the force he used was pretty rough. He became quite a bully then."

Born in 1913 in Bukinova, then part of the Habsburg Empire and now a part of western Ukraine, Mr Botnar saw more than his fair share of hardship. He was imprisoned twice by the Communists and condemned to seven years' hard labour for being a spy. In between, he was captured by the Germans and made a prisoner-of-war before escaping to join the French Resistance.

He arrived in Britain in 1966 and set up Nissan UK three years later. Through his chain of dealerships, Mr Botnar increased sales to nearly 100,000 and turned Nissan UK into one of the biggest car distributors in Britain, employing more than 2,000 and generating profits of more than pounds 100m. Along with Norman Tebbit, then trade and industry secretary, now a Tory peer, he was instrumental in persuading Nissan to build its Sunderland car plant.

But tragedy and disaster were never far away, either in his personal or professional life. At Christmas 1972, his only daughter, Camelia, 20, died in a car crash. Two years later he settled all his shares in Nissan UK on a charitable trust, and in 1978 set up the Camelia Botnar Foundation, a residential and training centre for deprived youngsters in West Sussex.

He donated almost pounds 100m to charities, including pounds 14m to the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, London, where an pounds 8m pathology and research laboratory is named after his daughter, and pounds 5m to the Nuffield Orthopaedic Hospital.

Financial disaster struck at Christmas 1990, when Nissan of Japan announced it was terminating Mr Botnar's contract to sell its cars. Four months later, in April 1991, Nissan UK's headquarters were raided by the Inland Revenue on suspicion of tax fraud. Two Nissan UK executives were subsequently jailed, but Mr Botnar fled to Switzerland where he lived until his death - at one time classed as a fugitive from justice - protesting his innocence and railing against the taxmen and the Japanese.

Last November, the Revenue withdrew arrest warrants against him after accepting that he was too ill to stand trial. But, in a separate judgment, the High Court ruled that he was liable to repay the Revenue pounds 68m in tax on dividends paid into the charitable trusts by Nissan UK between 1974 and 1990.

Mr Botnar continued his campaign against the Revenue, launching an action against two of its inspectors for malicious prosecution. By an irony of timing, a High Court judge had been due to rule yesterday on an application from the Revenue to have the case struck out. Now Mr Botnar will never get his day in court.

Robert Creighton, the chief executive of Great Ormond Street, said: "It was humbling to be in his presence. This was a man whose career and life saw the most extraordinary low points, the kind that most of us would never dream of living through. Those experiences affected his view of the world.

"OK so he was a very tough businessman, but he was also a big- hearted philanthropist and it was all genuine. There was no way it was generated by self-interest or guilt. He had seen the bottom of the pile. If it hadn't been for the Inland Revenue, he would have died a hero. As it is he has died a bitter man with a tarnished reputation."

Obituary, Review, page 6

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