Isidore Jack Lyons (known before 1991 as Sir Isidore Jack Lyons, CBE; 1 February 191618 February 2008) was a British financier.
After building up a substantial retail business with his brother Bernard Lyons (1913-2008), he was charged in 1987 in the Guinness share-trading fraud. He was convicted and was heavily fined. Subsequent judgments from the European Court of Human Rights held that his trial was not fair. However, the convictions of Lyons and the other members of the Guinness Four were upheld by the Court of Appeal of England and Wales and the House of Lords. Lyons was a significant philanthropist to the arts in Britain for many decades, donating to the London Symphony Orchestra, the University of York, the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal Opera House among others.
Lyons had been awarded the CBE in 1967 and knighted in 1973 for public and charitable services and services to the arts, but both these honours were rescinded in 1991 in the wake of his conviction. The British Prime Minister John Major wrote him a letter of consolation following the removal of his honours.
Success in business
Lyons was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, the fifth of six children born to businessman Samuel Henry Lyons (1883/4–1959) and his wife Sophie (née Niman; 1885–1971), both Orthodox Jews. Samuel Lyons had emigrated to England from Poland when still a child.
Samuel Lyons had established a men's clothing business, Alexandre. The company had a factory and retail shops. Lyons attended Leeds Grammar School, leaving school at the age of 16, and later moved to the United States to study business at Columbia University. While there, war was declared and Lyons could not return to the UK so he enlisted in the Canadian army but because of his poor eyesight, he was confined to working in the Board of Trade. He met his future wife, singer Roslyn Rosenbaum, in Canada, and, in 1944, he became an assistant director of the country's Prices and Trade Board.
Returning to Leeds in 1945 he and his brother Bernard contributed considerably to the growth of the family business with the expansion of branches and the development of a lucrative export division during the early post-war period. This enabled the business to grow rapidly into a large conglomerate of companies called United Drapery Stores, or UDS. By the 1960s, UDS Group had succeeded in taking the lead as the United Kingdom's top retailer, with a 1,300-strong empire of retail shops. Businesses within the UDS conglomerate included: Richard Shops, Allders of Croydon, John Collier, Timpsons, Alexandre Stores, John Blundell Credit Company, John Myers catalogue mail order business, Brooks Brothers, Peter Pell, Arding & Hobbs and Whiteleys department stores, Fifty Shilling Tailors and other department and duty-free stores. The number of men's suits sold in all UDS menswear shops in the year ending January 1967 was 1,119,000.
Within Allders alone growth continued throughout the 1970s to such an extent that in 1976 it became the third largest department store in the country, beaten only by Harrods and Selfridges. Meanwhile, the UDS Group had entered a new retail arena, that of the duty-free shop, when it acquired the licence to open and operate the shop at London's Heathrow airport. Attached to its Allders department store division, and later operated as Allders International, the UDS Group rapidly built up its network of duty-free shops around the world. In 1983, the UDS Group was sold to Hanson plc.
With a mutual interest in musical endeavours, Lyons became acquainted with the Conservative Party Prime Minister Edward Heath, and remained close to his successor as Conservative leader, Margaret Thatcher. Lyons campaigned politically for lower rates of taxation and for continued state support of the arts.
In 1980 Lyons resigned from UDS and became a senior advisor to Bain & Company, the American management consultants. Lyons' political connections were valuable to Bain, and he worked as a business consultant and lobbyist in the early 1980s.
Guinness case and appeals
Lyons was accused of having used his personal friendship with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to ensure the Guinness brewing group's offer for Distillers in 1986 was approved by the Office of Fair Trading. Thatcher replied to a letter from Lyons saying the matter would be passed to the minister then responsible, Paul Channon. The bid was subsequently unblocked. Lyons also bought a substantial block of Distillers and Guinness shares in the lead-up to the bid, with a personal guarantee from Saunders that any future losses in the value of his shares would be paid by Guinness.