Bob Gavron

Lord Gavron gave £500,000 to the Labour Party in 1996 and £500,000 on June 25 1999. He was made into a Peer on 19th June 1999. His personal wealth is £50 million. He was one of a group of donors who gave a total of £500,000 to Tony Blair's private office fund before the 1997 election.The fund was a 'blind trust' set up by Jonathon Powell, now Blair's Chief of Staff at 10 Downing Street.

Until June 1998 he was a Director of the St Ives Group, a printing and publishing group which is one of the FTSE top 250 companies. He made about £29 million from share sales up to this time (he also held £8 million worth of shares in 1998). St Ives Group supply almost every book company in the UK, along with printing magazines (including Loaded, Marie Claire, Heat, Sunday Telegraph Magazine, FT's The Business and Farmer's Weekly), direct mail, company documentation (ICI, Rolls Royce, BAT/Rothmans, Halifax, Powergen) and Tax forms for the Inland Revenue. Directors got paid between £146,000-£210,00 in 1999.

The print side of the St Ives Group includes Burrups, one of the world's leading financial printers, and Clays, who have a factory in Bungay, Sussex. Clays print academic and educational books, dictionaries, legal and reference books, mass-market paperbacks, bibles and trade hardbacks. The St Ives group also has companies in the USA and Germany.

St Ives Direct, based in Edenbridge, Kent, are major suppliers of inserts, mailers, booklets and brochures for the direct mail market (including DFS, BT/Cellnet, Mazda, Argos, Boots, CWS, GUS, Allders, Somerfield and Spar). They also print material for financial companies (like Midland Bank, Royal and Sun Alliance and Prudential) and the government (COI and Home Office). The multimedia division, based in London, Tunbridge Wells, Blackburn, Bungay and Holland, replicates CDs and floppy disks and manufactures the inlay cards and booklets (including Aerosmith, All Saints, Boyzone, Cher, Madonna and Steps).

Lord Gavron also owns £7 million worth of shares in Folio Holdings (he is Chairman of the Folio Society book club company). Until March 2000 he was Chairman of the Guardian Media Group, which owns the Guardian newspaper. He is a is a Governor of the London School of Economics, along with Cherie Blair, Lord Puttnam, Lord Stevenson and Lord Bragg, and where Anthony Giddens (3rd Way guru) is Director and Lord Layard (an adviser to the DfEE, given a peerage in March 2000) is a Professor.

Affiliations

• Foreign Policy Centre, conference funder
• IPPR