Joseph Kagan, Baron Kagan

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Joseph Kagan, Baron Kagan (born June 6, 1915 in Kaunas , † January 18, 1995 in London ) was a British entrepreneur from Lithuania who became a Life Peer member of the House of Lords in 1976 . The knighthood awarded to him in 1970 was revoked in 1981 due to a prison sentence for theft, tax evasion and forgery of documents.

Life

Origin, World War II and emigration to England

Kagan, whose parents ran in Kaunas a textile company and suppliers of the Imperial Russian Army for camouflage clothing were attended high school in the Jewish ghetto of Kaunas and started through the mediation of his mother in 1933 a study Master in textile industry at the University of Leeds . He then returned to Lithuania, but made frequent business visits to textile companies in the West Riding of Yorkshire . After the occupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union in 1940, he was captured by Red Army troops, while his father managed to escape to England.

Afterwards, Kagan ran the family cotton mill with Soviet permission , which was extremely unusual for a person from the Jewish ghetto due to the Soviet invasion of the Baltic States . Later this economic preference was associated with an early connection between Kagan and the KGB and even a possible agent activity, for example by the politicians John Silkin and Samuel Silkin, Baron Silkin of Dulwich , who were also of Jewish-Lithuanian descent.

After the occupation of Lithuania by the German Wehrmacht in the course of the Barbarossa company in the summer of 1941 , Kagan was captured again and then found himself in several labor camps and most recently as a worker in a foundry in Kaunas. In 1943 he married his girlfriend Margaret Stromas, whom he and her parents spent nine months behind a partition in the foundry with the help of the Roman Catholic foreman Vytautas Rinkevičius , who was awarded the Israeli honorary title of Righteous Among the Nations in 1976 and died in 1988 , had hidden.

After the reconquest of Lithuania by the Red Army in autumn 1944, Kagan received permission from the Soviet occupation authorities to relocate with his family to Romania . After his arrival in Bucharest , he received an entry permit into the British Mandate Palestine , but after arriving there he settled with his family in West Yorkshire .

Entrepreneur and supporter of Harold Wilson

Gannex corporate headquarters in Dewsbury

Upon arriving in the UK, Kagan began making Gannex waterproof fabric in a garage using funds borrowed from friends . Fortunately for him, the then Minister of Commerce (President of the Board of Trade ), Labor Party politician Harold Wilson , wore Gannex raincoats and thus advertised the entrepreneur free of charge. Between him and Wilson, a friendship and Kagan, who in 1951 formed Huddersfield the Kagan Textiles Limited founded. Shortly thereafter, the company received an order from the Department of Defense to supply a lightweight coat made from a cotton- nylon blend and a major order from the Bradford Police Department to equip the local police force. With the growing fashion consciousness of the 1960s, however, the company lost its influence.

He later supported Wilson's successful campaign in the general election on October 15, 1964 , from which he emerged as Prime Minister . On November 24, 1970, Kagan was beaten to the Knight Bachelor and from then on carried the suffix "Sir". In 1970 he acquired Eusemere House , an 18th century country house in Pooley Bridge on Lake Ullswater , where Thomas Clarkson , an opponent of slavery in England and one of the founders of the abolitionist movement , originally lived and where the poet William Wordsworth was a frequent guest was.

In November 1971, he founded the Trust Kagan after the donations maximum sum of 10,000 pounds sterling was limited. Wilson's work as leader of the opposition was financed by the Kagan Trust after the Labor Party lost the general election on June 18, 1970 . An official promoting the work of the opposition leader with budget funds (the so-called Short Money ) took place after the election of the Labor Party in the general election on 28 February 1974 on the initiative of Edward Short , the then Lord President of the Council and leader of the faction of government in the house of Commons ( Leader of the house of Commons ).

Member of the House of Lords, imprisonment and loss of knighthood

By a letters patent dated June 30, 1976, Kagan was on Wilson's Resignation Honors List ( Resignation Honors List ) as a life peer under the Life Peerages Act 1958 the title of nobility Baron Kagan , of Elland in the County of West Yorkshire, bestowed. He became a member of the House of Lords until his death. Its official induction into the House of Lords was on July 6, 1976 with the assistance of Douglas Houghton, Baron Houghton of Sowerby, and John Gregson, Baron Gregson .

When arrest warrants were issued against Kagan and his wife in December 1979 on suspicion of tax evasion and forgery , his relationship with Harold Wilson also featured in numerous press comments. Kagan, who was in Israel at the time, refused to return, but was arrested a few months later while staying in Paris on April 8, 1980 and extradited to Great Britain on July 31, 1980.

Four of the charges relied on Section 1 of the Theft Act of 1968, stating that in August 1977 he and his eldest son had stolen 23 drums of indigo dye powder that were owned by Kagan Textile Ltd , which at that time had already been taken over by a company. Three other charges related to the theft of a total of 216 additional drums. He was also charged with dishonestly and for profit forging a document used for accounting purposes.

Probably the real cause of the prosecution was not necessarily Kagan's financial transactions, but rather his continued ties with Eastern Europe , which aroused the interest of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). This interest was based on the fact that Kagan was friends with Richardas Vaygauskas, a Lithuanian who worked at the embassy of the Soviet Union in Great Britain between 1969 and 1971 and was known as an officer of the KGB.

Kagan was sentenced on December 12, 1980 to a fine of £ 375,000 and a ten-month sentence, which he served in open prison at the Rudgate Open Prison in North Yorkshire until his early release in June 1981 . His company at the time had tax debts and unpaid bills of £ 1.1 million. At the same time, his knighthood of a Knight Bachelor was revoked on April 24, 1981, but he retained the life peerage.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ London Gazette  (Supplement). No. 45165, HMSO, London, August 7, 1970, p. 8678 ( PDF , accessed November 23, 2013, English).
  2. ↑ London Gazette . No. 45239, HMSO, London, November 27, 1970, p. 13037 ( PDF , accessed November 23, 2013, English).
  3. ↑ £ 3m to walk in footsteps of poet, clothes baron and slavery savior ( Memento of the original dated December 2, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: News & Star of July 8, 2008  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.newsandstar.co.uk
  4. ^ London Gazette  (Supplement). No. 46916, HMSO, London, June 1, 1976, p. 7823 ( PDF , accessed November 23, 2013, English).
  5. ↑ London Gazette . No. 46951, HMSO, London, July 2, 1976, p. 9167 ( PDF , accessed November 23, 2013, English).
  6. ^ Entry in Hansard (July 6, 1976)
  7. ↑ Who was Norman John Worthington? The truth about Harold Wilson's secret MI5 file . In: Daily Mail of October 3, 2009
  8. ↑ London Gazette . No. 48599, HMSO, London, May 1, 1981, p. 6229 ( PDF , accessed November 23, 2013, English).
personal data
SURNAME Kagan, Joseph, Baron Kagan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British textile entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH June 6, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Kaunas
DATE OF DEATH January 18, 1995
Place of death London