Nicholas Van Hoogstraten

by Mike Walsh

  Rowland was a buccaneering figure who flew around Africa in a private jet, making deals and treating it as if it were all his for the taking. His exploits were to gain him notoriety when Britain’s Prime Minister Edward Heath called him ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’. To this, Rowland had replied that he wouldn’t want to be the acceptable face. It was a retort Hoogstraten could have made. The two men had a similar disregard for what others might think.

  Rowland was born Rowland Walter Fuhrhop in 1917. He had an exotic and controversial upbringing, starting out in the Hitler Youth and then attending private school in England. Despite anglicising his name and taking British citizenship, he was interned during the Second World War. After the war he moved to Southern Rhodesia, attracted by the freedom and high life enjoyed by Europeans.

  He made a success of it and quickly came to the attention of the directors of a small company called the London and Rhodesia Mining and Land Company, which in 1961 had profits of £158,000.

  Among those who admired Rowland’s style was board member Angus Ogilvy, who was later to marry a member of the British royal family, Princess Alexandra. With Ogilvy’s blessing, Rowland took over the running of the company. Under a new name, Lonrho, it became a huge corporation. Rowland went on a spree, acquiring companies as avidly as the young Nick Hoogstraten had bought stamps. Among them was the old mining and farming firm Willoughby’s Consolidated. It had large assets, but was sluggishly run and ripe for an aggressive takeover. Rowland bought it cheap in one of his many fast and furious dealings as he built up his new empire. In 1989 Lonrho made profits of £272 million. This was almost entirely down to the astonishing abilities of Rowland himself.

  When Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa, he awarded Rowland the country’s highest honour, saying of him: ‘He made an enormous contribution not only to South Africa, but to the whole of Africa.’ Rowland had been one of the first European businessmen to criticise colonialism and to support Africa’s emerging nationalist leaders, a pattern replicated by Hoogstraten, who was to support the rebel Frelimo cause in Angola and Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF party in Zimbabwe.

  Rowland’s success in winning contacts across the continent was based on his ability to woo politicians and governments. He used his charm and, if that was not enough, he employed bribery, often on a massive scale. ‘Every man has his price,’ he said. ‘The definition of an honest man is when the price is too high.’

  By the seventies Rowland’s name had become a byword for daring and corporate flair. He had panache, energy, style and charm. Van Hoogstraten got to know and admire him. An understanding of Rowland helps in understanding something about Van Hoogstraten.

  Rowland was a flawed commercial genius. He was a consummate deal maker, flying tirelessly between London and Africa, brokering deals that others found scarcely credible. When he bought a controlling share in the Ashanti Goldmines in Ghana, it seemed nothing was beyond his capabilities.

  When he died in 1998, the former president of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda, said: ‘We worked together to empower Africans. He is a great loss to us.’ Rowland had gone his own way and did not care a damn what anyone thought of him. It was easy to see how Van Hoogstraten would have been drawn to him.

  But as so often in those with restless energy and a will to succeed, there was a destructive self-obsession. In his definitive work Tiny Rowland: A Rebel Tycoon, Tom Bower offers this character assessment: ‘Hypersensitive to real or imagined slights to himself, he was not worried about humiliating and manipulating employees … like a woman, Tiny wanted to be admired and, by the same token, loathed his critics, mistrusted their motives, and would offer no concessions in the countless vendettas he has waged to secure their total destruction. Invariably, Rowland would complain that he was the victim of prejudice, a conspiracy or dishonesty.’

  As with that of Cecil Rhodes, the assessment could have been written of Nicholas van Hoogstraten.

  It was Rowland who inadvertently gave rise to the younger man’s love of aliases. Van Hoogstraten told the authors that during a conversation on a flight, Rowland told him how he never checked in under his own name. He used an alias in case the aircraft was hijacked and the guerrillas sought out wealthy passengers to hold for ransom. Van Hoogstraten took this advice to heart. Soon he had a host of aliases. As we have seen, they were to range from the stolid Nicholas Hamilton to the exotic Adolf von Hessen. They became both a source of amusement and a useful tool for commercial anonymity.

  Once, when the authors were filming with Van Hoogstraten at Cartier in London, the tycoon mentioned to the marketing director that he was a good customer of the firm. The Cartier man looked blank. ‘Van Hoogstraten?’ he mused. ‘I don’t recall seeing your name, sir.’

  ‘Well, that’s because you don’t know me as Van Hoogstraten,’ came the reply. Van Hoogstraten then opened his briefcase and took out a sheaf of receipts from Cartier in the name of Hamilton. ‘That’s me,’ he announced to the surprise of everyone. This simple subterfuge drew amazement from the Cartier directors, despite the fact that they must have had among their wealthy customers some of the greatest scallywags and villains in the world (as well as several members of the Royal Family). Van Hoogstraten, of course, enjoys the element of shock or surprise. In this case it all began with Tiny Rowland’s advice, though Van Hoogstraten was to develop it so much further and make it all his own.

  In the late eighties Van Hoogstraten built up a sizeable holding in the Lonrho group. He felt that anything Tiny Rowland thought worth investing in was probably worth a punt. Naturally, he chose to do it by stealth. In the case of Lonrho, this was done through companies based in South Africa. Among his chosen vehicles was a company called Corwil, registered in South Africa with an address in Parktown, Johannesburg. Corwil is an investment holding company. Its sole investment is listed as being in Lonrho-controlled operations.

  Van Hoogstraten bought shares in the Lonrho subsidiary Willoughby’s Consolidated. This long-established British company, with gold mining and ranching interests in Rhodesia and South Africa, was founded in 1894. Nearly a century later it had become, in Van Hoogstraten’s astute eyes, a suitable case for ‘thieving’. In other words, he thought the share price undervalued the assets. By 1988 he owned seventy-six thousand shares in Willoughby’s. He decided to mount a full bid for control.

  According to financial reports at the time, he offered to buy half a million 50p shares at 68p a unit from British shareholders. His attempts to add to his portfolio on the South African market had failed. According to the Brighton Evening Argus, Van Hoogstraten said he was giving shareholders an opportunity to cash in ‘an unmarketable investment’.

  In the boardroom of Willoughby’s the scale of Van Hoogstraten’s offer caused alarm. A senior Lonrho director, Paul Spicer, said: ‘Mr Van Hoogstraten must be buying shares because he thinks they are undervalued. It’s the only reason I can imagine.’ He was right.

  The predatory move against Willoughby’s was reported to the Takeover Panel, a City agency through which both parties could work to ensure fair dealing. It was purely voluntary and so had no teeth. Van Hoogstraten lost no time in exposing the absurdity of the panel. At a hearing, its members were amazed by his brazen lack of regard for the panel’s rules. When they asked if he intended to abide by them, Van Hoogstraten simply replied: ‘No.’ The panel was shown up to be a toothless tiger and the iconoclast did what he always did and went his own way.

  Van Hoogstraten’s move against Willoughby’s highlighted weaknesses at the heart of Lonrho. It was suffering from a lack of hard cash.

  By 1993 Lonrho’s – and Rowland’s – best days were over. Only eight per cent of its turnover was from mining. Rowland had made too many investment errors and had failed to ensure his businesses could generate real profits. His business techniques raised eyebrows in the City and caused anger elsewhere. A deal involving Willoughby’s particularly enraged Van Hoogstraten. In 1995 Willoughby’s sold its controlling interest in the
Zambian amethyst mining company Kariba Minerals to the African Industrial and Finance Corporation. The trouble was that African Industrial was controlled by Lonrho. Van Hoogstraten smelled a rat. He wondered if Kariba was being deliberately undervalued.

  Amethysts are one of Van Hoogstraten’s favourite gemstones. Their blue-purple colour echoes the colour favoured by Roman emperors, and he adopted it as his own colour.

  Willoughby’s had a seventeen per cent share in the amethyst company, while Van Hoogstraten’s chosen South African financial vehicle, Corwil, had, he says, an even bigger stake. He staged a coup at Willoughby’s Annual General Meeting after finding out that the sale of Kariba was not even on the agenda. With his control of a large block of Willoughby’s shares, he was able to defeat all the resolutions from the Lonrho-appointed board. The directors were forced to resign.

  In 1996 Lonrho begin to demerge most of its African businesses. Perhaps its nadir was reached when it sold a proportion of the Metropole Hotel group to the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi. Lonrho has changed its name to Lonmin and is now primarily a general trading company. Today Van Hoogstraten owns the residue of what was once Willoughby’s Consolidated, consisting of ranching and agricultural estates. According to Tony Browne, who was to go on to manage the

  Van Hoogststraten estates in Zimbabwe, Van Hoogstraten initially wanted Willoughby’s gold mines. Instead he ended up taking over its ranching assets. It was to open a new chapter in his life.

  Van Hoogstraten has often said that he hates business. His experience of the Kariba affair no doubt played its part in his reaching that judgement. He told Business Age magazine: ‘I don’t want my children to go into [business] because they’ll become the sort of devious, dishonest person that I’ve become to protect my assets and I don’t want to risk that with my children. To succeed in business, you’ve got to be an actor, a liar and crook.’

  Tiny Rowland boasted he never visited the companies he took over. But Van Hoogstraten is temperamentally different. He takes a direct interest in everything he buys. And so, one day in the late 1990s, he found himself being driven out of Harare, down the long highway from Harare towards Bulawayo, to visit the former Willoughby estates.

  When he got to the dusty town of Mvuma he was astounded by what he saw. First, there was the fence. The estate’s perimeter was marked by three simple stands of barbed wire. It came up beside the road – and stayed there. For mile after mile. Van Hoogstraten was, he says, amazed as it kept on measuring out the road. The fence described the boundary of the Central Estates ranch and farm, enclosing an area bigger than Greater London.

  Van Hoogstraten was no stranger to ownership. He had mines, a country estate back in England, he owned almost entire streets, had homes on the Riviera, hotels, a furniture collection worth millions, a fabulous gem collection, the famed collection of stamps. But this was different. What he had taken over was a vast cattle ranch that saw its beginnings in the nineteenth century in the heyday of the first Europeans to settle on the plateau. The scale impressed even this very wealthy man. He was now not only a property owner, but a landowner on the scale of a prince.

  The Central Estates were not all that he had bought. Further south, at Gweru, was the smaller Eastdale Estate, and, near Bulawayo, the Essexvale Estate. In all, over 750 thousand acres.

  All this landed Van Hoogstraten with a dilemma. He was now the very thing he hated: a white man in Africa. More than that, he was a white man owning other people’s land. The ownership by itself did not trouble him. It was what had always gone with it: the racism, the exploitation, the bigotry. Van Hoogstraten was aware of all this.

  He decided to do something about it. He knew he had to be politically astute to ensure his investment would prosper and that he could secure it for the long term in a country whose government was increasingly hostile to white ownership.

  He put a two-pronged strategy in place: one part pragmatic, the other more personal and closer to his heart. The pragmatic part was his support for the government of Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s mercurial president, while the personal one was to do well by the estate’s workers and their families.

  He set to work. The company had four directors. As usual, Van Hoogstraten’s own name did not appear among them. He was represented by Caroline Williams. Tony Browne was also made a director, as well as general manager of the estates. His brief was to develop the estates along modern and progressive lines. A master plan was drawn up, comprising schools, a hospital, housing for the workers, new roads and other infrastructure. The staff were to be issued with smart new uniforms and their children would be educated on the estate, where the new schools would be equipped and staffed thanks to their beneficent owner.

  Browne looked after the Zimbabwe enterprises from 1998 to 2000. During that period several million pounds were spent on developing the infrastructure and on restocking the land. The local development manager told BBC reporter Jenny Craddock in 2000 that £200,000 a month was being spent at Central Estates. It was coming directly from Van Hoogstraten.

  Investing hard currency in a developing country is a risky business. Buying power has to be measured against the possible loss of value of the assets due to inflation and other hazards, such as political instability. To make the equation even more complicated, there is the consideration of lower production costs to be set against possible export earnings.

  Central Estates became a mixed development, with ranching, a safari business and ostrich farming. Ostriches may seem a whimsical venture but they are far from being so. Their meat is high is protein and low in cholesterol, while their hides are sought after for making shoes and handbags, especially in Japan, where they can earn welcome hard currency.

  As the programme of building and social reform began to take shape, the regime on the estates resembled a form of benign paternalism. Van Hoogstraten’s standing with his workers and their families grew. Browne found his employer’s change in style remarkable. ‘He was able to do a lot of good. Maybe it was him searching for redemption or some type of salvation in investing in the ordinary working person down there.’

  Browne had reason to be surprised and to think of his friend and boss as searching for redemption. He had seen how Van Hoogstraten had dealt with employees in England who he felt had cheated him. He had witnessed the summary beating meted out to employees in Brighton.

  With Van Hoogstraten’s temper appearing to be worsening and his fuse shortening with the advance of middle age, his African ventures seemed all the more remarkable. In Britain, he was a notorious figure whom one crossed at one’s peril, but in Zimbabwe he was a benefactor and was thought of on his estates as an elder of the tribe. His Zimbabwean girlfriend Tanaka Sali – the girl he picked up in the Harare nightclub – was a visitor to the estates. She vouches for the extent of his kindness to his staff, exemplified by issues of free milk and the provision of free education.

  ‘Nick is very kind,’ she says, adding the rider: ‘Whether that is coming from the bottom of his heart or not, that’s not for me or anyone to judge. He is a nice person as well, but he is a selfish person, too.’ And there, simply put, is the paradox of the man. But it is also the dilemma facing the rich: what one should do with one’s money and how one should ensure one holds on to it?

  The answer to the latter question, in Van Hoogstraten’s case, was to use all necessary force. In Africa, he employed armed guards to protect his grazing lands against cattle rustlers. The guards had the right to shoot if they came under threat from armed gangs. According to Browne, this has happened and several poachers have been shot and killed. He says the shootings took place according to standing orders and that such action is viewed as normal by local police. Van Hoogstraten has said that he regrets that in Britain a landowner cannot shoot trespassers with impunity.

  In his defence of his Zimbabwean assets, he has another strategy: make political allies. Taking a leaf out of Tiny Rowland’s book, he has long been a supporter of President Mugabe’s Zanu PF party. He has bac
ked this up by providing funds and by attending rallies. He has a portrait of Mugabe on the wall of his office but he has yet to meet the man.

  In 2002 Van Hoogstraten was reported to be backing the purchase of fighter aircraft by the Zimbabwean government. The deal, reputed to be for $250 million worth of Russian MiG aircraft, could be in breach of international arms embargoes against Zimbabwe. If the story is accurate, it is little wonder that Van Hoogstraten should want to broker arms deals. They are so very lucrative, with large commissions payable to many of those who participate. In some instances, the commissions – which include anything from genuine payments for middlemen to bribes for government officials – can account for twenty per cent or more of the total contract.

  Van Hoogstraten’s good relationship with Zanu PF has enabled him to conduct business very effectively in Zimbabwe. It is unlikely he would have been able to purchase pyrites mines without government agreement. But his special relationship as a white supporter of the government has not prevented the sequestration of some of his assets. At the time of writing, two of his estates, Essexvale and Eastdale, had been taken over by the government as part of the land reallocation programme. Families are already settling on the Central Estates and there are tales of looting

  In its accounts for the year ending 30 September 2000, Willoughby’s Consolidated’s tangible fixed assets of land, buildings and machinery were listed at £9 million and its total assets at £18,588,636. After depreciation and other costs, a loss was made of £550,000.

  Only in the long term will one know how successful Van Hoogstraten’s diversification into African investments has been. He has played his hand astutely on many occasions. Like Tiny Rowland, he has supported nationalist politics and, in a nod towards Cecil Rhodes, he has tried to do something for the ordinary people.