Swraj Paul
Swraj Paul, Baron Paul (born 1931) is an Indian-born, British-based business man. He was knighted by the Queen in 1978. In 1996 he became a life peer, taking the title Baron Paul of Marylebone in the City of Westminster.
Background
Swraj Paul was born in Jalandhar in 1931. His father ran a small foundry, making steel buckets and farming equipment. Swraj Paul was educated at the Punjab University and later obtained a Master's degree in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US.
On his return to India, Swaraj joined the Apeejay Group, which his father had founded. It was a twist of fate that he had to visit London to get his daughter treated for leukemia. He took over the operations of Apeejay Overseas and relocated permanently to London in 1966. After the Apeejay family partition, Lord Swaraj Paul renamed the company Caparo. From acquiring one steel unit, he went on to acquire more and founded the Caparo group in 1978, which developed into one of the leading producers of welded steel tube and spiral welded pipe in the UK. He stepped down from the management of the Caparo group in 1996, handing over his empire to his three sons.
New Labour links
Lord Paul owns Caparo Industries, a steel manufacturing business, which gave £101,000 to the Labour Party in 1998, £76,000 in 1997 and £109,000 in 1996, and more than £5,000 in 2000. In total, between 1994 and 1998 Caparo gave £387,000 to the Labour Party. This figure includes £47,000 given to the Industrial Research Trust, which funded Gordon Brown's private office before the 1997 election. Lord Paul is a friend of Gordon Brown and was appointed as an official ambassador for British industry in November 1997.
Caparo made £20 million in profit in 1998 and £25 million profit in 1999, with 4,000 employees at plants in Scunthorpe, Hartlepool, Huntingdon and Birmingham. The business is run by his 3 sons and is based in Baker Street, London.
His family is worth £330 million (Angad, his son, co-produced the film "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels"). Lord Paul's shares in Caparo are held by a company registered in Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, an offshore tax haven. Because he was born in India (he became a British citizen in 1976) Lord Paul is 'non-domiciled' for tax purposes, which means he can avoid income tax, capital gains and inheritance tax on the millions of pounds he holds 'offshore'.
Lord Paul acts as Tony Blair's 'unofficial envoy' to India, used as a messenger between the UK and Indian Governments. He sits on the Competitiveness Working Party: Promoting The Best Of Best Practice and the West Midlands Regional Competitiveness Working Party.
Affiliations
He holds the Pro-Chancellorship of Thames University (1998) and its Governorship (1992-97), and the Chancellorship of the University of Wolverhampton and the University of Westminster. He is a member of the Foreign Policy Centre Advisory Council and MIT's Mechanical Engineering Visiting Committee. He is the chairman of the Olympic Delivery Committee with the key task of initiating measures to acquire land and provide infra-structure for the London Olympics 2012.
