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Tetra Pak heir given suspended jail term

Tetra Pak heir Hans Kristian Rausing has pleaded guilty to the UK charges of preventing the burial of his wife, whose body was found rotting under refuse bags at their mansion a few weeks ago.

Tetra Pak heir given suspended jail term

The ten month jail sentence has been suspended for two years and Rausing will only serve time behind bars if he commits another offence during that time.

Before the Isleworth Crown Court in London, Rausing said that he pleaded guilty to both the charge of preventing his wife’s burial and to the second charge of drunk driving.

Millionaire Rausing was originally arrested on suspicion of murdering his wife Eva, but the charges were later changed to preventing the lawful and decent burial of his 48-year-old US-born spouse.

Police discovered the body of the late Eva Rausing after having picked up her husband for a drunk driving offence in Wandsworth, London, in the beginnng of July.

According to the British Guardian newspaper, officers found post addressed to Mrs Rausing as well as drug paraphernalia in his car.

Searching the couple’s mansion in Chelsea, police accessed an annexe on the second floor of the house, which staff were not permitted to enter.

In a room, sealed off with gaffer tape, they found the decomposing remains of Mrs Rausing, which they later found had been sprinkled with deodorising powder, according to the paper.

The Rausings enjoyed an affluent lifestyle 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, but were later released.

The prosecutor on Wednesday confirmed that all suspicions that Rausing was responsible for the death of his wife have been abandoned.

“No other charges will be added apart from the drunk driving,” the prosecutor said, according to daily Aftonbladet.

In a statement that Hans Rausing prepared for the police, he said that he is feeling more mentally stable since being sectioned to a clinic in the beginning of July and that he now fully understands that his wife is dead.

“I was traumatized by her death, I don’t know how she died. I didn’t act rationally after her death but tried to carry on as if she was still alive,” Rausing wrote.

He added: “I believe, in the period since Eva died, I have suffered some

form of breakdown.

Rausing also confirmed that he had tried to do something about the smell where his wife’s body was putrefying.

Rausing has been staying at a psychiatric hospital since the last hearing on July 18th. Photographs in the British press this week showed him looking dishevelled while being accompanied by a helper on a shopping trip.

The family, headed by Rausing’s father Hans, is worth 4.3 billion pounds ($6.64 billion), according to this year’s Sunday Times Rich List.

Hans Rausing, 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 revolutionised the packaging of food and drink.

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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.

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.
 
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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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