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Tetra Pak heir’s wife found rotting under bags

A member of the Tetra Pak packaging dynasty was bailed Wednesday by a London court on charges of preventing the burial of his wife, whose body was found rotting under bin bags at their mansion.

Published: 19 July 2012 07:06 CEST
Tetra Pak heir's wife found rotting under bags

Millionaire Hans Kristian Rausing was originally arrested on suspicion of murdering his wife Eva, but on Tuesday he was charged with preventing the lawful and decent burial of his 48-year-old US-born spouse.

Looking frail in the dock in west London, the bearded, bespectacled 49-year-old spoke only to confirm his name, age and address. He was granted conditional bail to appear in court again on July 26.

The court heard that Eva Rausing’s body was found in an advanced state of decomposition on July 9 under several layers of clothing and rubbish bags beside a bed on the second floor of their luxury home in London.

Police went to the house after detaining Rausing — who, as heir to the billions his Swedish father made by selling his stake in Tetra Pak, is one of Britain’s richest men — on suspicion of drunken driving.

Rausing was represented in court by Alexander Cameron, the elder brother of British Prime Minister David Cameron.

Judge James Henderson ordered Rausing to reside at the Capio Nightingale Hospital, a private psychiatric hospital, and said he could not leave unless accompanied by a staff member.

The couple struggled publicly with drug problems and they were known for their generous support of several addiction charities.

The Rausing family, headed by Rausing’s father Hans, is the 12th richest in Britain, worth £4.3 billion ($6.7 billion, 5.5 billion euros), according to The Sunday Times newspaper’s Rich List 2012.

Eva and Hans Kristian Rausing enjoyed an affluent lifestyle, spending much of their time in their 11-bedroom mansion in Barbados — but battled for years against addiction.

The couple, who have four teenage children, first met at an addiction clinic and were charged in 2008 after Eva tried to take crack cocaine and heroin into a function at the US embassy in London.

Rausing’s father Hans, 86, moved to England in the 1980s in order to avoid Sweden’s high tax rates and lives with his wife Marit on a vast estate in Sussex, southeast England.

He developed the Tetra Pak business, which had been founded by his own father in 1944, into a multi-billion dollar operation that revolutionized the packaging of food and drink.

AFP/The Local

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TETRA PAK

Tetra Pak billionaire Hans Rausing dead at 93

Swedish businessman Hans Rausing, credited with turning food packaging company Tetra Pak into a global giant, has died in England aged 93, his family said.

Published: 31 August 2019 18:06 CEST
Tetra Pak billionaire Hans Rausing dead at 93
Hans Rausing inherited Tetra Pak from his father Ruben Rausing. Photo: Peter Lyden
“Hans Rausing had exceptional drive, and right to the end a commitment to entrepreneurship in Sweden and around the world,” they wrote in a statement. He died on Friday.
   
His father, Ruben Rausing, co-founded a company in southern Sweden that was an early innovator in food packaging, seeking to move away from bulk sales of foods such as flour and sugar to consumers.
   
Ruben Rausing developed the first cardboard container in the shape of a tetrahedron — a shape made of four triangular sides, also known as a triangular pyramid. It is the shape that gave the company its name.
   
The new packaging was most notably used to sell milk, replacing glass bottles in a pre-plastic revolution for beverage packaging.
   
Born in 1926, Hans Rausing was appointed managing director of Tetra Pak International in 1954, and with his brother Gad led the company for four decades. 
   
He retired as president in 1993, having grown the company from seven employees to 36,000 and giving it a global presence.
   
Under the brothers' leadership, Tetra Pak continued to develop new packaging, creating sterile materials and new shapes, and designed machines for the ultra-high-temperature (UHT) pasteurisation of milk.
   
In 1991, Tetra Pak acquired Alfa Laval, a leading supplier of equipment for the agricultural industry, and the group became known as Tetra Laval. 
 
Rausing, who left Sweden for the United Kingdom in the 1980s for tax reasons, is estimated to have amassed a fortune of some $12 billion (11 billion euros), according to Forbes magazine.
 
READ ALSO: 
 
 
Tragedy struck the family in 2012, when the businessman's daughter-in-law Eva died from a drug overdose aged 48. 
   
Her rotting corpse was found more than two months after her death under a pile of bedding in a room in the London home she shared with Rausing's son, Hans Kristian.  
   
He pleaded guilty to preventing the lawful and decent burial of his wife, and received a 10-month sentence, suspended for two years.
 
He said he could not deal with her death. The couple had met at a drug addiction clinic.
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