Chapter 18
Creative Accounting – The UK Experience
18.1 INTRODUCTION
In early May 1993 Asil Nadir, a prominent UK businessman of Turkish Cypriot origin, left his London house and was driven to a small, picturesque airfield in Dorset where he boarded a light plane which flew him to Beauvais in Northern France. There he transferred to a private jet which flew, via Vienna (where refreshments of caviar and champagne were taken on board) and Istanbul, to northern Cyprus1. Nadir, who at that time was on trial for the alleged theft of £34 million, and thought to be subject to bail conditions, did not return to the UK but continued to reside, in same luxury, in northern Cyprus, which does not have an extradition treaty with the UK.2 However, in August 2010, following a high court ruling that Nadir would be allowed bail if he voluntarily returned to the UK, and accompanied by a high level of publicity and media attention, Nadir flew into Luton airport ahead of a case management hearing at the Old Bailey in early September.3 Nadir’s earlier departure, which caused no little embarrassment to the authorities, was just one more dramatic incident in the extraordinary saga of Polly Peck – the business which Nadir had, within a decade, virtually single-handedly, transformed from an obscure garment manufacturer with turnover of just £1 million into a fruit packing and electrical conglomerate which was one of the UK’s largest, and apparently most successful, ...
