ANTON RUPERT was the founder of a multibillion-pound international conglomerate that he built on the twin pillars of tobacco and alcohol in his native South Africa. A quietly determined Afrikaner, Rupert managed to expand his interests by winning friends abroad when his country was an international pariah.
Anton Edward Rupert was born in 1916 in a small Eastern Cape town. His father was a struggling lawyer, and, after excelling at school, Rupert went to medical school but lack of finances forced him to drop out. He went to the University of Pretoria where he obtained a chemistry degree and was briefly a lecturer. After leaving university he bought a dry-cleaning business cheaply and sold it a few years later for an enormous profit. He used this money to set up a tobacco company which he soon renamed Rembrandt.
Meanwhile, he bought a liquor business in the Cape by selling shares to local grape growers to whom he sold his idea of mass-marketing wine.
Over the next 30 years Rembrandt wrested control of the country’s nascent wine industry from powerful brewing interests and also expanded the tobacco side. The company then broadened its interests beyond tobacco and alcohol by investing in financial services, mining, communications, printing and packaging, medical services, engineering and food.
In 1988 Rembrandt founded Richemont, a Swiss luxury goods group which now owns such brands as Cartier, Alfred Dunhill, Seeger, Piaget, Baume & Mercier and Montblanc.
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In the mid-1990s Rembrandt and Richemont consolidated their tobacco interests into Rothmans International and in in 1999 Rothmans merged with British American Tobacco. The following year the companies under the Rembrandt name divided into the firms Remgro and VenFin.
The Rupert business empire includes hundreds of companies in thirty-five countries on six continents, with combined yearly net sales in the region of £5.6 billion.
Rupert played an important role in the South African Small Business Development Corporation, whose loans to small and medium-sized businesses have created nearly half a million jobs since 1981. From the early Sixties Rembrandt promoted education, art, music and the preservation of historic buildings.
Rupert was a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, now the WWF for Nature. In 1997 he, Nelson Mandela and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands became the founding patrons of the Peace Parks Foundation, which has set up transfrontier conservation areas across southern Africa.
A proud Afrikaner, Rupert as a young man supported the Nationalism that was to spawn apartheid, but later became a strong critic of the Government’s policies. He was a quiet, modest man who was happiest working hard and did not revel in the luxuries that his vast wealth could have provided.
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He was widely admired among his contemporaries, one of whom recently declared that “Anton Rupert is the greatest businessman that South Africa ever produced”.
Rupert’s youngest son, Anthonij, died in a car accident in 2001. His wife, Huberte, died last October and he is survived by their daughter, Hanneli, and their son Johann, who is chief executive of Richemont and chairman of Remgro.
Anton Rupert, businessman and conservationist, was born on October 4, 1916. He died on January 18, 2006, aged 89.