John Cuckney, Baron Cuckney

John Graham Cuckney, Baron Cuckney (* 12. July 1925 in India ; † the thirtieth October 2008 ) was a British politician of the Conservative Party , industrialists and government officials.

life and career

Cuckney, son of Major General Ernest John Cuckney and his wife Lilian Williams, attended Shrewsbury School and then began studying medicine at the University of St Andrews . After serving in World War II with the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers and the King's African Rifles , he began studying history and economics .

He was recruited by MI5 and worked there until 1959. Cuckney's time there is the subject of Peter Wright's book Spycatcher , where Wright described him as a "rough, matter-of-fact officer".

After leaving MI5, Cuckney worked at the stockbroking firm Standard Industrial Group before joining commercial bank Lazards , where he was the first director to step down in over 100 years. He then worked with Sir David Alliance to set up the Anglo Eastern Bank , which specialized in financing commercial transactions between Great Britain and the Middle East .

Cuckney became chairman of the Mersey Docks and Harbor Board in 1970 , which he restructured and restored its solvency after the possibility of bankruptcy had previously existed. In 1972 he left the Mersey Docks and Harbor Board to become Executive Director General of the Property Services Agency , where he managed government real estate.

In 1974 he switched to the Crown Agents , who got into financial difficulties after the second banking crisis from 1973 to 1975.

He began there as chairman and outsourced the sale of weapons from the British Ministry of Defense into a separate company, International Military Services , which was run as a state company under the umbrella of the Ministry of Defense. He was chairman of the International Military Services until 1985.

He left the Crown Agents in 1978 and moved briefly to the Port of London Authority , before he was promoted to Knight Bachelor in July 1978 .

Cuckney became Minister of State for Social Security Peter Lilley in 1992 . In this capacity, after the death of press czar Robert Maxwell , who illegally withdrew large sums of money from his company's pension funds to rescue his group of companies, he succeeded in mediating a comparison between the funds and the companies benefiting from the amounts withdrawn. On 25 July 1995, he became a life peer as Baron Cuckney , of Millbank in the City of Westminster , was appointed.

family

Cuckney was married to Elizabeth Baleman in first marriage, in second marriage from 1960 until her death in 2004 to Muriel Scott Boyd and in third marriage from 2007 to Jane Newell.

swell

• Obituary in the telegraph
• John Graham Cuckney, Baron Cuckney, on thepeerage.com , accessed August 17, 2015.
• Obituary in the Guardian
• Obituary in the Times