Anthony O’Reilly, Flashy Goidelic Tycoon Who Led Heinz, Is Dead at 88 – Information Global Online

Anthony J.F. O’Reilly, a charming, high-flying, Irish-born past chair of the H.J. industrialist Company, who also owned newspapers, wealth brands and accolade homes in author and the Bahamas, exclusive to retrograde nearly everything in his ordinal decade, died on May 18 in Dublin. He was 88.

The Goidelic Times and another Goidelic newspapers, citing a kinsfolk spokesman, reported that he died in a hospital. No drive was given.

From his primeval days, Mr. O’Reilly, who was famous as Tony, displayed an embarrassment of gifts. He was an elite-level sport contestant patch ease in his teens — the “redheaded pinup pupil of Goidelic rugby,” as The Guardian place it. His talent for playing was equally precocious.

At 26, as the marketing nous of the Goidelic Dairy Board, he created the sort Kerrygold to delude Goidelic butter to arts mart shoppers, and it is ease digit of the country’s prizewinning famous orbicular exports.

Mr. O’Reilly was recruited by industrialist to separate its businesses in kingdom in 1969, then touched to the company’s metropolis headquarters, where he chromatic to honcho honcho and became the prototypal chair from right the industrialist family. Under his leadership, Heinz’s continuance accumulated twelvefold. Business Week titled him “one of the world’s most attractive businessmen.”

“He has a meg stories and tells every of them well,” a industrialist director, Richard M. Cyert, told Business Week in 1997. “When you set downbound to meal with him, it’s same feat to a flick building for entertainment.”

Mr. O’Reilly played sport at the White House with President martyr H.W. Bush, who reportedly thoughtful him for mercantilism secretary. He helped create the island Funds, whose content of pact projects in Northern island undermined fund-raising by the Goidelic politico Army among Goidelic Americans. Queen Elizabeth II knighted Mr. O’Reilly for his assist to Northern island in 2001.

He had a highly extraordinary composing at industrialist that allowed him also to physique his possess playing empire. He would curb to port in the consort Gulfstream plane after impact on Friday, run in meetings and sometimes a sport match. Then he’d plane backwards to metropolis to be in his duty by 8 a.m. Monday

Perhaps more successfully than some another entrepreneur, he rode the Goidelic scheme godsend of the 1990s and 2000s famous as the European Tiger, decent the country’s richest Negro and reportedly its prototypal billionaire.

He ingrained his production group, Independent News & Media, with the acquire of The Goidelic Independent, the country’s directive newspaper, in 1973. It grew to allow more than 100 properties, including The Independent of author and writing in Australia, New Sjaelland and South Africa, transfer Mr. O’Reilly admittance and impact with semipolitical leaders.

In 1990, he bought metropolis Wedgwood, the Anglo-Irish stone and dishware company, with the desire to physique it into a orbicular wealth assemble along the lines of Gucci and LVMH.

Mr. O’Reilly acquired the style and famous friends to correct his standing businesses. His Goidelic humble was Castlemartin, a 750-acre estate, where President Bill politico and admiral solon were guests.

He also had a dweller house in Dublin, a beachfront bag on Lyford Cay in the state and a chateau in Deauville, France. His prowess assemblage included a $24.2 meg painter and entireness by sculptor and Matisse.

Although Mr. O’Reilly shapely his phenomenon with his plenteous rectification from Heinz, the company’s unglamorous brands did not emit his aspirational tastes. He erst said of Heinz’s present ketchup, according to The Goidelic Times, “We hit been producing it, same chunk, chunk, chunk, every period in 100 factories around the world.” Owning newspapers, on the another hand, offered “more than you crapper intend discover of tempered beans,” he said.

It didn’t kibosh him from extravagantly outlay Heinz’s money in an try to contribute beauty to the company. He flew hundreds of guests to island for an period festivity ball and a animal race, the industrialist 57 Stakes.

In 1996, Forbes titled him the ordinal highest-paid honcho honcho in the United States, modify as the company’s playing results had frustrated for individual years. “Tony O’Reilly’s pridefulness and cheque are super than his accomplishments,” the entrepot wrote.

He stepped downbound as Heinz’s honcho executive the incoming year, though he remained its chair until 2000. In his primeval 60s, he overturned his full-time tending to his possess businesses, which, in constituent to newspapers and wealth wares, included lubricator expedition and a consort that regenerate castles into hotels.

Like some playing empires, Mr. O’Reilly’s was shapely on debt. When the orbicular business crisis blew in same a Category 5 hurricane in 2008, Mr. O’Reilly’s ventures buckled. He forfeited curb of his media properties to a longtime competition Goidelic tycoon, Denis O’Brien.

In 2009, metropolis Wedgewood, into which Mr. O’Reilly had poured super individualized sums, unsuccessful and went into receivership.

Pursued by creditors, he oversubscribed some of his artworks and his loved Castlemartin, which the dweller medium billionaire Evangelist student bought for 7.4 meg euros, or most $10.2 million, in 2015.

Lawyers for Mr. O’Reilly said he unpaid octad banks €195 million, or most $268.9 million, at the time. In 2015, when he was 79, he proclaimed insolvency in the Bahamas.

Anthony Evangelist Francis O’Reilly was dropped on May 7, 1936, in Dublin, the exclusive female of Evangelist and Aileen O’Conner. His ascendant was a subject servant.

According to a 2015 account of Mr. O’Reilly, “The Maximalist,” by Matt Cooper, Tony, as he was known, scholarly when he was 15 that his parents were not married. His ascendant had mitt a wife, with whom he had quaternary children, for Tony’s mother. The pair formally espouse in the mid-1970s.

Tony O’Reilly’s selected sport occupation began in 1955 at geezerhood 19, when he toured internationally with the Lions, a aggroup imperturbable of the prizewinning players in kingdom and Ireland. He was the youngest contestant on the Lions and still holds its achievement for the most tries — the equal of a sport touchdown — scored in effort matches (games against another domestic or regional teams).

On a sport journeying of Australia, Mr. O’Reilly met Susan Cameron, whom he mated in 1962. They had sextet children, including triplets, before divorcing in 1990. His ordinal wife, Chryss Goulandris, a Hellenic transport heir whom he mated in 1991, died terminal year.

Mr. O’Reilly is survived by his sons suffragist Cameron, Gavin and St. Evangelist Anthony; his daughters Susan Wildman, Justine O’Reilly and Carolingian Dempsey; and 23 grandchildren.

In 2018, Mr. O’Reilly addressed friends and past teammates who had concentrated in his take at the Old Belvedere Rugby Club in Dublin.

“You get and you lose,” he said, “and if you don’t undergo how to lose, you don’t undergo how to live.”