The death of Eva Rausing and the decline of the Tetra Pak dynasty

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jul/11/death-eva-rausing-tetra-pak

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Earlier this year, I sat in one of the grandest houses in London, sipping tea from a Moomin mug and marvelling. I was there to interview the great Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist, but now and again I'd wonder: could all of these tapestries, paintings, drawing room after elegant drawing room in a house that cost £20m when it was bought 15 years ago and with reportedly the second biggest private gardens in London after Buckingham Palace really be only a fragment of a global empire funded from cardboard milk cartons?

Aubrey House in Holland Park was and is an elegant outpost of Sweden, the home of Sigrid Rausing. She is the granddaughter of Ruben and Elisabeth Rausing, who devised a watertight cardboard container for storing milk, juice, yoghurt and ice-cream that went into production in 1953. The story goes that one day at lunch in Sweden, Elisabeth suggested to Ruben that he invent a lightweight alternative to milk bottles. That afternoon he began working on prototypes and later patented the invention. Their sons, Hans and Gad, marketed the product and today 137bn patented Tetra Paks are sold each year. If you're an average human, you will use 23 Tetra Paks this year.

But it was Britain rather than Sweden that hosted the reclusive Rausings' multibillion Tetra Pak empire. In 1982, Hans and Gad moved to the UK to avoid Swedish taxes. In 1993, the brothers headed the Sunday Times rich list, becoming Britain's wealthiest men and eclipsing the Queen's fortune. Hans sold his half of the business to his older brother in 1995 for a reported £3.5bn. Gad died in 2000.

Hans's children Sigrid, Lisbet and Hans have all faced the challenge of what to do with their trust fund money. Sigrid emulated her father in philanthropic generosity, becoming the darling of literary London by using some of hers to fund the literary magazine Granta, as well as Granta Books and Portobello Books, two of Britain's most exciting independent publishers (that's why I was interviewing Lindqvist in her house: Granta is publishing his books, some for the first time in English). She also established The Sigrid Rausing Trust, which, since 1995, has given £177.4m to Burmese refugees, sex-trafficked women in Albania, slum dwellers in Kenya and victims of domestic violence in Dorset, among others.

Her brother, too, established with his wife Eva, the Eva and Hans K Rausing Trust, which made donations to anti-drugs charities such as Mentor, founded by the Queen of Sweden. His munificence prompted Prince Charles, who was on first-name terms with the couple, to call Hans "one very special philanthropist". His wife Eva was co-patron with the Duchess of Cambridge of the drug charity Action on Addiction.

But the Rausing name is hardly just a byword for philanthropy. On Tuesday, across town from Sigrid's home, her brother Hans Kristian, 49, was arrested on suspicion of drug possession and his wife Eva, 48, was found dead at the couple's five-storey Georgian townhouse in Cadogan Place, Chelsea. Police say Eva's death is "unexplained" but speculation is rife that she died from a drug overdose.

This isn't the first time Hans K (as he's known, to distinguish his name from his father, but giving him a surely unwonted Kafkaesque aura) and Eva have attracted police attention. In 2008, Eva, an American socialite and daughter of a Pepsi-Cola and real estate executive, Tom Kemeny, attended a gala at the US embassy in London, where security guards found several wraps of crack cocaine and heroin in her designer handbag. The discovery prompted a police search of the couple's £12m home in Chelsea where they found £2,000 of drugs. Both were arrested.

"I am very sorry for the upset I have caused," Eva Rausing told reporters hours after her arrest, on the doorstep of her home. "I have made a serious mistake which I very much regret," she said. "I consider myself to have taken a wrong turn in the course of my life." Hans K, by contrast, made no statement, thereby underscoring his reputation for reticence or even asocial eccentricity.

The couple's 2008 arrest doubtless caused a great deal of family embarrassment. It came shortly after Hans senior and his wife Marit celebrated their golden wedding at their 900-acre East Sussex estate at Wadhurst Park, where the 6ft 8in, 86-year-old Rausing paterfamilias in retirement breeds deer and wild boar, and collects vintage cars.

It provoked even more newspaper moralising. The Sunday Times noted classical parallels: "After King Midas rid himself of his golden touch, a second curse made him resemble an ass. The Tetra Pak billionaire Hans Rausing must have sensed a similar malediction last week on learning that Hans Kristian, his son, and Eva, his American daughter-in-law, had been arrested in a drug search of partygoers at the US embassy in London."

William Langley in the Sunday Telegraph drew contemporary parallels: "All this comes with familiar echoes; reminders that wealth and breeding offer little defence to human weakness. The histories of the Gettys, the Guinnesses, the Rothschilds, the Kennedys and, if you must, the Hiltons – fabulous dynasties pursued by misfortune – suggest that no family brand is strong enough to support weak individuals."

As if to prove that all fabulous dynasties are pursued by misfortune, heiress Kate Rothschild and Ben Goldsmith's marriage has recently ended very publicly, with much tabloid revelling in pictures of her with US rapper Jay Electronica. Media glee over dynastic suffering is inescapable: "As members of two of the most eminent banking dynasties, the pair will face a costly divorce as they carve up their assets," noted the Telegraph, adding: "It is also likely to cause further friction as Miss Rothschild's sister Alice is in a relationship with Mr Goldsmith's brother, Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith."

As for Hans K Rausing, papers claimed that he was psychically wounded early on in life because he was intimidated by a 6ft 8in billionaire namesake of a father whose business acumen he could never equal. It was this sense of inadequacy that drove him to run off to India as a young man, where he lived rough and reportedly indulged in what the tabloids have described as a life of "hippy hedonism", often in that magnet for the putatively counter-cultural wastrel, Kathmandu.

Hans K met Eva Kemeny in a US addiction clinic 25 years ago after his attempts to establish a British-based financial services company foundered and his drug problems overwhelmed him. She, his family hoped, would bring stability into his life. The couple have since had four children. Eva was written up as everything he was not: beautiful, thin to the point of being bird-like, a flamboyant partygoer who loved dancing – often on tables. Eva, incidentally, is the sister of Be Kemeny who in 2000 married Jack Kidd, the polo-playing brother of model Jodie.

Hans K, by contrast, has been portrayed as monosyllabic and vacant, socially maladroit and incessantly watching telly. In photographs he appears bearded and burly, like Joaquin Phoenix towards the end of the movie I'm Still Here. He has had no vocation or hobbies, apart, perhaps, from amassing an international property portfolio from his trust fund. He and Eva built a house in Barbados with 12 acres of beachfront and surrounded by high walls. In 2002 he bought an apartment on the £182m luxury cruise liner The World, which, the Sunday Times couldn't help but report, "perpetually roams the seas like the Mary Celeste".

The press revelled in the couple's seeming globe-trotting ennui. "It takes billions to buy this much boredom," ran one headline. "Drugs and a couple so rich they don't know what to do with their lives," went another. The pair were portrayed as inhabiting a far from golden triangle – Chelsea, Barbados, rehab. Such evisceration by media no doubt reinforced the Rausing family in their decision to refrain from seeking publicity.

By contrast with Hans K, his sisters Sigrid and Lisbet are portrayed as women with money, brains and purpose. Lisbet is a historian with degrees from the University of California and Harvard, where she taught for eight years. She is also the author of Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Harvard, 1999). She lives on a 48,000-acre Highlands estate and donates millions of pounds to wildlife charities and her father's initiative, the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project run from London University's School of Oriental and African Studies. Incidentally, that project's website yesterday offered this statement: "We wish to make it clear that recent tragic events in London have no connection to HRELP at SOAS – our support comes from Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin's Arcadia Fund. The Project is named after Hans Rausing senior and has nothing to do with Hans Rausing junior."

Sigrid is no less academic. She has a PhD in social anthropology from the University of York and wrote a study of Estonian social and cultural anthropology called History, Memory and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia: The End of a Collective Farm. She also contributes to the New Statesman. Like her sister she has a Scottish estate in the Monadhliath mountains. Her husband, Eric Abraham, is a South African-born film, TV and theatre producer, whose credits include Kolya, directed by Jan Sverák, which won the Oscar for best foreign language film.

There is another branch of the reclusive Rausing dynasty. Gad Rausing had three children Kirsten, Jorn and Finn. Kirsten is a leading horsebreeder who has been a member of the Jockey club since 1990 and has run stud farms in Sweden, Ireland and Newmarket. She is unmarried but reportedly the person who more than anyone else runs the family business since Gad's death. Jorn reportedly lives quietly in London and is a major investor in Ocado, the online grocery delivery firm. Finn is even more obscure than the other Rausings.

Each member of the Rausing dynasty has, perhaps understandably, run shy of publicity while trying to retain a family reputation for philanthropic generosity. That image was tarnished this week when the tawdry details of the tragedy in Cadogan Place emerged. Hans Kristian Rausing remains in hospital, three members of his house staff are being questioned and there are reports that his wife's body may have been in her bedroom for a week. And the photos published of the couple in the last weeks of her life show two gaunt, desolate people, ill at ease with their bodies and the world.

Perhaps there is nothing especially edifying in the Rausings' tragedy, but some will insist that there is – that we must learn from it that more money breeds more problems, or that the drugs don't work if you think they'll bring happiness, or that trustafarians can readily be destroyed by what looks like a gift with no ties. Opinions rush into the vacuum left by the Rausing family's reticence, most of them cheap, all worth resisting.