Treasure Islands - Nicholas Shaxson [23]
How much profit were these foreigners really making? Nobody could be sure, but London’s influence on the Argentine economy was immense. “Without saying so in as many words, which would be tactless, Argentina must be regarded as an essential part of the British Empire,” the British ambassador had noted in 1929. But he was not complacent, for he was aware how fast large U.S. companies were penetrating these areas of British influence. “The United States under Hoover means to dominate this continent by hook or by crook,” the ambassador had recently noted. “It is British interests that chiefly stand in the way. These are to be bought out or kicked out.”2 The big historical competitors of the British meat packers, though now inside the Argentine cartel, were the Swift and Armour groups from Chicago that until recently had formed the core of the American Beef Trust, an organization founded by the robber baron Philip D. Armour. The trust had sewn up food distribution inside the United States so effectively that a book about it published in New York in 1905, entitled The Greatest Trust in the World, described it as “a greater power than in the history of men has been exercised by king, emperor or irresponsible oligarchy . . . here is something compared with which the Standard Oil Company is puerile.”3 Although by the time of the coast guard raid their cartel tactics had been tamed in the United States, the trust was still happily playing the cartel game in Argentina, in partnership with the British.
Argentinians, of course, hated having their economy carved up in informal economic empires run by foreigners. “Argentina cannot be described as an English dominion,” said Lisandro de la Torre, the fire-breathing Argentinian senator who led the investigation into the foreign meat packers, “because England never imposed such humiliating conditions on its colonies.”4
So he was especially pleased with what the coast guard found in the ship’s holds, buried beneath a reeking load of guano fertilizer: over 20 crates labeled “corned beef” and bearing the seal of Argentina’s Ministry of Agriculture. When his men opened them, they found not corned beef but documents. De la Torre had exposed to public view for the first time the secret financial details of William and Edmund Vestey, founders of the world’s biggest meat retailers, Britain’s richest family, and among the biggest individual tax avoiders in history. Their story, and their wrangles and deals with their American competitors, provides a remarkable wind down into the emergence of multinational corporations in the early years of the last century and the emergence of a global industry of international tax avoidance alongside them.
William and Edmund Vestey had started out in 1897 shipping meat trimmings from Chicago to their native Liverpool, where they had built cold storage facilities, giving them an edge over their competitors. They branched out into poultry farming in Russia and China in the first decade of the twentieth century, from where they began processing and shipping vast quantities of super-cheap eggs to Europe. They set up more cold stores and retail outlets in Britain, and then in France, Russia, the United States, and South Africa, then moved into shipping in 1911, before expanding out to ranches and meatpacking in Argentina from 1913. At the outbreak of the First World War, they bought up more farmland and plants in Venezuela, Australia, and Brazil,5 by which time they were involved in the entire supply change of the beef trade, from cattle to restaurant hamburger. They were pioneers of the truly integrated multinational corporation.
The Vestey brothers dressed in dark,