Billionaire Richard Pratt has died in Melbourne at the age of 74 after a long battle with prostate cancer.
Over the past four decades, Pratt built paper and packaging company Visy group into one of Australia’s largest public companies, with more than 6000 staff and annual revenue of more than $3 billion.
Pratt is survived by his wife Jeanne and four children: Anthony, Heloise, Fiona and Paula, who was born in 1997 to his long-term mistress Shari-Lea Hitchcock.
Pratt’s personal fortune is estimated to be around $4 billion.
Pratt was born in the Polish city of Gdañsk in 1934 and emigrated to Australia in 1938, settling in the Victorian town of Shepparton. In 1945, Pratt’s father Leon founded the Visy business with the Feldman family,
Pratt, who studied at the University in Melbourne and had aspired to be an actor at one stage, become chief executive of Visy in 1965 after the death of his father. At the time, the company’s revenue was just $5 million.
Over the next 40 years, Pratt built Visy into one of the world’s largest packaging companies, expanding beyond Australia to establish large packaging operations in the United States. The group, which has revenue of more than $3 billion, controls around half of the Australian packaging industry, with rival Amcor controlling the other half.
It was the relationship between Visy and Amcor that badly tarnished Pratt’s reputation. In 2007, Pratt confessed that he and two other senior Visy executives had illegally fixed the prices of cardboard boxes with executives from Amcor.
Last year the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission brought criminal charges against Pratt, alleging he provided false or misleading evidence during the ACCC’s Visy/Amcor cartel probe. This case was dropped on the eve of Pratt’s death.
While Pratt had built a reputation as one of Australia’s most generous philanthropists – his Visy foundation is estimated to give away up to $10 million a year – the fallout from the cartel episode badly damaged Pratt’s standing in the community.
Last March, he voluntarily handed in his Companion and Officer of the Order of Australia medals. He also gave up his presidency of the Carlton Football Club when the criminal charges were made.
Pratt will be remembered as a generous philanthropist and an aggressive businessman who was prepared to push the boundaries to grow his business.
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James was the editor and publisher of SmartCompany and LeadingCompany for five years. He is now the Australian Financial Review‘s companies & markets editor, and a former BRW editor.
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