Sir Anwar Pervez is one the most influential businessmen in the UK because of his many personal qualities. His Bestway Group, which had a turnover of £5.2bn last year, is among the most respected family firms in the country.
In Bestway, employees who are English or of Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan origin work harmoniously side by side.
Sir Anwar once said: “Seventy per cent of the staff are Indian Hindus, followed by Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and English people. We have no problems of religion or anything. You know God is everywhere, God is within you.”
Over the decades, Sir Anwar has given generously to many charities. Although Sir Anwar has become a billionaire, he has not lost the common touch. He is fond of saying that his days in Bradford, where he worked on the buses after arriving from Pakistan as a 21-year-old, were, in some ways, his most carefree.
Sir Anwar turned 90 last year. His birthday was celebrated with a banquet for 800 at the Royal Albert Hall. The guest list included many employees who had served him loyally for over 30 years. The event also marked 50 years of Bestway.
In a sense, the torch has already been passed to younger members of his family. Sir Anwar stepped down as chairman and assumed the title of emeritus chairman on 1 July 2024. His son, Dawood Pervez, who was born in 1970 and educated at Eton, is Bestway Wholesale’s managing director.
Sir Anwar’s nephew, Lord Zameer Choudrey, who came to Britain in 1958 as a 12-year-old from the family village of Thathi in Gujar Khan in Pakistan, has taken over from his uncle as chairman. Zameer’s son, Haider Choudrey, who also went to Eton, was appointed CEO.
One of Sir Anwar’s innovations was to introduce a charity day at Royal Ascot, where he maintained the highest standards of sartorial elegance. With his morning suit, he would often wear a top hat. It was an example followed by members of his family. The women would put on fascinators, combining them often with hijabs.
In 2024, Bestway raised £100,000 at Ascot for the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. Last year, at the 32nd Bestway annual charity at Ascot, the figure was £250,000 for the British Asian Trust. Sir Anwar, who invited to take tea with King Charles and Queen Camilla, walked the short distance to the to the Royal Enclosure from the Pavilion restaurant where he was hosting lunch for Bestway’s guests.
“The King gave me a card and a gift,” Sir Anwar said later.
Meanwhile, Haider Choudrey was made a fellow of the British Asian Trust.
Bestway’s origins date back to 1963 when Sir Anwar opened his first cornershop in London in 1963. He used the “Bestway” name for the first time in the 1970s, and incorporated Bestway Wholesale into the business in 1976.
Today, the Bestway Group consists of: Bestway Wholesale, the UK’s largest independent wholesaler; Well Pharmacy (previously the Co-op Pharmacy, which was bought for £620m 2014), the UK’s largest independent retail pharmacy chain; Bestway Cement Limited, Pakistan’s largest cement manufacturer; United Bank Limited, Pakistan’s second largest bank; Bestway Properties, a UK investment property portfolio.”
In a book, The Bestway Story, commissioned by Lord Choudrey to mark his uncle’s 90th birthday and the company’s 50th, Sir Anwar stressed in the introduction: “The role of those around me cannot be underestimated in the success of the Bestway Group. Along with the original partners, Younus Sheikh was there at the beginning and integral to the development of often extremely ambitious strategies, and still stands with me today.”
Sadly, Sheikh, a founding director of Bestway, passed away, aged 79, on 27 January this year. Incidentally, his son, Atif, was a scholar at Eton.
Sir Anwar also spoke of family bonds: “My nephew, Zameer, now Lord Choudrey, deserves special credit here. Since joining the business, he has grown with it and a significant number of the ideas for expansion and strategies were formulated by him. I chose the right person to build this business. My sons Rizwan and Dawood, and great-nephew Haider, along with other young professionals from the Bestway family have all been active in the business, with Haider now tasked to lead the business into its next stage of growth. I hope that they can replicate the trust, loyalty and togetherness in the partnership I have had with Zameer and Younus to take the business to new heights and set the foundation for generations to come.”
He also said: “I have learned much on this journey, and I have been blessed to be surrounded by good human beings. The one quality I looked for in them, and still do in everyone, was that I could trust them. If you can trust someone, and they you, it gives you a confidence that you can achieve anything.”
He explained he was a not a man who wanted to expand the business quickly by borrowing heavily from banks: “The business has weathered the storms of many external economic crises largely because we never used banks as our umbrella as so many other businesses do. If you are over-dependent on lenders, you will begin shivering when bad times come. On the rare occasions when we did owe anything to the bank, we’d pay it back as quickly as possible. Progress was not as fast, but at least it was, and is, solid.”
He spoke warmly about his nephew: “Zameer, who had cut his teeth working in the Earls Court shop since the age of 16, filling in between his studies by stacking shelves and serving customers, had enrolled at the University of Kent in Canterbury to study accountancy. He had continued to work in Bestway’s shops and warehouses during evenings, weekends and holidays.
“As time went on, he took more and more responsibility. He would help his uncle count the takings at the end of the day and take the cash to the bank. After a while, he moved on to reconciling the figures with the tills and then on to keeping the books, freeing me to do tasks elsewhere, a development he very much welcomed.”
Sir Anwar, who has always been able to influence people because he has been a gentle, soft-spoken man, concluded: “My view is, and has always been, if my own family don’t work, how can I tell the people I employ to work hard? It is down to everyone’s continued efforts that the business success that we have achieved in the last six decades has been phenomenal.”
Lord Choudrey said of his uncle: “I must have had hundreds, of conversations with him about his vision since I started with the business as a schoolboy. One of the ones I remembered most distinctly was when he described how Pakistan was run by 22 powerful and wealthy families. ‘I would like us to be one of those families,’ he told me and that really stayed with me.
“I bought into that idea. I thought then, I would love it if our family could be one of the 22. It wasn’t about the power or wealth. It was a target, a mountain to climb. Human beings need a vision like this to succeed, something to aim for. That is what drove him and I resolved to let it drive me, too.”
Lord Choudrey referred to his uncle’s dedication: “His is a story of grit, vision and purpose. From a remote village in rural Pakistan to the founding of Bestway in 1976, Sir Anwar’s journey is not just one of commercial success but of social upliftment, community investment, and philanthropy. It is our privilege to celebrate him and the 50 years of impact he has inspired.”
Haider Choudrey recounted the values that have come down the generations: “He’s set the template of the core values of the business. You need to sustain that. That’s what differentiates us as a family and a business group. Obviously, as you move ahead into the future, you adapt with the times. But you don’t want to lose the core values and ethos. That is how we would judge our success.”
An outsider’s point of view was provided by Lord (David) Cameron, the former prime minister, at the Royal Albert Hall banquet. He paid tribute to Sir Anwar’s lifelong values of enterprise, generosity, and service, and called him “a true British success story whose influence spans continents and generations”.
“Only in Britain could someone go from being a bus conductor to a billionaire businessman purely through their own blood, toil, tears and sweat. That was Sir Anwar’s way – the hard way, the long way, the best way,” said Cameron.
Praising Sir Anwar’s “extraordinary record in promoting healthcare and education both in the UK and in Pakistan,” Cameron described him as the “real king of convenience” and “ambassador of shopkeepers.” He lauded Bestway as a business that had grown big while supporting the small – empowering thousands of independent retailers in the UK and overseas.
“Yours is a business that isn’t just entrepreneurial, it enables other entrepreneurs,” he said. “Every small shop run by families like yours, working around the clock like you, that is who you help. And you don’t just give them a good price. You give them a profile, a voice. Your status confers upon them a status of their own.”
Cameron’s speech touched on the core values that have defined Sir Anwar’s life – enterprise, family, and community.
“When we think of that generation who answered the call for workers, we tend to discuss and focus on how little they arrived with. Tonight, I want to focus on how much they brought with them, the values that drove them, that sustained them, the values with which they helped to rebuild this country, the values that Sir Anwar embodies,” he said.
“Sir Anwar proves what most entrepreneurs know. There is no such thing as overnight success, just night after night of hard work, late shifts, early starts, long hours, grit and grind.”
Cameron also drew a parallel between Sir Anwar and the late Margaret Thatcher, noting that both understood the power of family-run enterprise. “You have created the paragon of the family firm,” he said. “Family members are the reason you do it, that very deep desire of humans to look after our own, to care for families, to pass something on to future generations.”
As Cameron concluded in his tribute: “When I look at your life, the values you’ve lived by, and I think of the difficulties we face as a nation today, it is so clear that we need more of what you brought and what you have lived your life by – enterprise, family, community.”
ENDS