Ernest Saunders

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Biography of Ernest Saunders
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Biography of Ernest Saunders

Ernest Walter Saunders (born October 21, 1935) was a British business manager, best known as one of the "Guinness Four".

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[edit] Personal life

He was born Ernest Walter Schleyer in Austria and moved to the United Kingdom in 1938 when his parents emigrated to escape Nazi rule. He was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, was married in 1963 to Carole Ann Stephing, and has two sons and one daughter.

[edit] Professional life

He had a career in management with Beecham, Great Universal Stores and Nestlé before becoming Chief Executive of Guinness plc (now a part of Diageo plc) from 1981 to 1986. He was renowned for his ruthless cost-cutting efficiency, earning from his employees the sobriquet "Deadly Ernest".

Under his charge Guinness plc launched a takeover bid for Edinburgh-based United Distillers plc early in 1986. Subsequent to the bid, which resulted in success for Guinness, Saunders (along with Jack Lyons, Anthony Parnes and Gerald Ronson) was charged and convicted on 27 August 1990 of counts of conspiracy to contravene section 13(1)(a)(i) of the Prevention of Fraud (Investments) Act 1958, false accounting and theft, in relation to dishonest conduct in a share support operation (see Guinness share-trading fraud). A series of appeals was finally dismissed in December 2002, although a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights declared that the defendants were denied a fair trial by being compelled to provide potentially self-incriminatory information to Department of Trade and Industry inspectors which was then used as primary evidence against them. This breached their right to silence.

While there was no suggestion that Saunders sought to or actually did profit from these offences in an immediate or direct manner, the allegation was that they were committed to make the company's takeover bid more likely to succeed.

[edit] Sentence and appeal

Saunders appealed against his sentence of five years in prison, and on 16 May 1991, the sentence was reduced to two and a half years. Lord Justice Neill said that he was satisfied that Saunders was suffering from pre-senile dementia associated with Alzheimer's disease, which is incurable. With full parole, Saunders was released from Ford Open Prison on 28 June 1991 having served only 10 months of his sentence.

A DTI report described him as a man who did "unjustifiable favours for friends and himself".

After release, he recovered from the symptoms which had led to the diagnosis. In an interview with The Times published in January 1992, Saunders said the symptoms were a result of a "cocktail of tranquilisers and sleeping tablets" he had been prescribed, and that he was making a good recovery. It is frequently asserted that Saunders procured his early release by pretending to have Alzheimer's.

Since then, Saunders has worked as a business consultant, including advising mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse from its early days until prior to its flotation. Charles Dunstone, the Chief Executive of Carphone Warehouse, said: "We were young guys who didn’t know what we were doing. He made us think about the questions we ought to ask or the information we ought to look at."

He was later appointed chairman of the executive committee of a US-based multinational petrol credit-card company, Harpur-Gelco.

[edit] Further reading

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