It would perhaps be a good idea if Sir Anwar Pervez didn’t read his own profile before 15 March 2025.
That is when his family, led by his nephew, Lord Zameer Choudrey, is planning the mother of all parties to celebrate Sir Anwar’s 90th birthday.
And Sir Anwar certainly deserves it. The chairman emeritus of the Bestway group has established one of the most successful family businesses in the UK.
Bestway has an annual turnover of £4.5bn. It is worth recalling that the young Anwar Pervez arrived in 1956 as a 21-year-old from Pakistan, and began by working as a conductor and driver on the buses in Bradford. He looks back on those days as among his happiest.
He now likes to spend as much time as possible in Dubai where the climate suits him. On 1 July 2024, Lord Choudrey succeeded his uncle as Bestway’s chairman.
And Lord Choudrey’s elder son, Haider, 37, took over from his father as Bestway’s chief executive officer. He was educated at Eton and Cambridge.
And Sir Anwar’s son, Dawood, 50, who was also at Eton – there are lots of Old Etonians wandering around the corridors of the company – also plays a crucial role as managing director of Bestway Wholesale.
But it’s not just money which reflects Bestway’s success. People seem genuinely happy to work for Bestway. There are more Indians than Pakistanis among its employees, and they are outnumbered by white English folk. Though it is a family business, Sir Anwar insists “promotion should be on the basis of merit” and not kinship. He is not too keen on “work from home”.
He is frank about WFH: “I hate it.”
Lord Choudrey wants the birthday party to be a surprise for Sir Anwar.
The emeritus chairman turns up for a chat with Eastern Eye over lunch at one of his favourite dining clubs, Mosimann’s in Belgravia, preceded by his chauffeur driven limousine.
“I decided to walk from Harrods but I stumbled and fell, and everyone asked me, ‘Are you ok?’ ” he begins, moved by the courtesy of British people.
In Dubai, he has a routine of taking a walk in the morning and in the early evening every day but there he doesn’t have any problems with uneven pavement surfaces. “The walk is on plain ground.”
He doesn’t know too much about the birthday party, although there is a rumour there might be some sort of a bash in Buckingham Palace.
“I know nothing about the party or the venue – no one has told me anything,” he says in a mock grumble.
But he adds that he had dinner three times with the Queen and that he met Prince Charles, now King Charles, “a few times and he’s a nice man”.
He has a vague idea that Lord Choudrey has commissioned a former journalist, Teena Lyons, to put together a book about him. She has interviewed Sir Anwar and even been to Pakistan for background research.
She seems an ideal person for the job. She describes herself as “the bestselling UK ghostwriter”. Her company is called “Professional Ghost”.
“During her lengthy career as a London-based professional journalist, Teena also worked for several national papers and consumer magazines, including The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Sunday Telegraph and Cosmopolitan,” her website says.
“After more than fifteen years in business, Professional Ghost has collaborated on a large number of bestselling business books and non-fiction titles including Banking On It, by Anne Boden, Sold Out by Bill Grimsey, Who Dares Wins in Business by Joff Sharpe and Almost is not Good Enough by Andrew Jennings,” it goes on. “The ghost writing service on offer has expanded to include biographies, fiction titles and even some ‘chick lit’. A number of titles across all genres have gone on to become bestsellers, won awards and coveted slots on ‘book of the year’ lists.
“Teena’s own book, Complete Guide to Ghostwriting, was released in late 2014.”
What should Sir Anwar’s biography be called?
Maybe The Bestway from Bradford? Or Curried Beans in Bradford?
Mohammed Anwar Pervez was born in Ambala on 15 March 1935 in pre-partition India. The family village, Thati, where his father and other relatives lie at rest, is a two-hour drive from Islamabad.
“It’s an agricultural village,” says Sir Anwar.
He grew up being educated in Urdu and says: “I love Urdu poetry. I can understand it more rather than Shakespeare or anybody else.”
He speaks of life in England in the early years with remarkable fondness. “It was very good when I was a young man. The culture was very nice. A lot of things have changed in every culture and in every religion. It shocks me. I feel sad about that.”
He didn’t encounter much in the way of racism in Bradford. On the contrary, he experienced kindness from his landladies and elderly women he met on the buses in Bradford. One took trouble to offer him curried beans.
He remembers arriving in the UK as though it all happened yesterday, though he is describing Britain from nearly 70 years ago. It was about 10 years after the end of the Second World War. The prime minister Sir Anthony Eden had plunged Britain into the Suez crisis.
1956 was the year two of the “Cambridge spies”, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, appeared in Moscow after vanishing as diplomats in mysterious circumstances in 1951; double yellow lines to prohibit parking were introduced in Slough (now represented by Labour MP Tan Dhesi); the Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru was made a Freemen of
the City of London; and Jim Laker took a record 19 wickets in the fourth Test between England and Australia at Old Trafford.
It was also the year Ian Fleming’s Bond novel, Diamonds Are Forever, was published.
“I came by Qantas Airways, took me 24 hours, Super constellation or something,” Sir Anwar recalled. “There were many stops, I remember Aden, Rome, Heathrow which had a lot of sheds.”
His destination was not London, though. “My cousin was living in Bradford, so I took the bus to Victoria, and from Victoria, I took the taxi to go to King’s Cross, and from there I took the train to Bradford.”
This year, the BBC has set its new crime drama, Virdee, based on A A Dhand’s novel, in Bradford.
Having saved enough by doing double shifts on the buses in Bradford, Sir Anwar opened his first convenience store in London’s Earl Court in 1963. It was called “Kashmir”.
Bestway, founded in 1976, has grown to become a diversified multinational business with interests across the wholesale, pharmacy, real estate, cement and banking sectors. Serving over 12 million customers and employing over 41,000 individuals, the group supports and serves communities through its operations across the UK, Pakistan and the Middle East.
It's Sir Anwar’s leadership that has given Bestway its distinctive benevolent character. Staff are loyal and tend to stay with the company for 30 years or even longer.
When he was knighted in 1999, the prime minister Tony Blair sent him a note in which he said the honour invested by the Queen “pays tribute to your remarkable achievements both in the private sector and through your charitable contributions. You have seen your business grow from the small corner store into a successful national chain. The government applauds your entrepreneurial spirit backed by such generous deeds”.
He has framed that note along with a treasured letter from Margaret Thatcher who said his knighthood was “fully deserved”.
She told him: “Over the years you have been a wonderfully generous patron to a wide range of causes and to the local community. Your support has made a great many projects possible which otherwise would not have been and brought benefit to a very large number of people.”
How Bestway has grown is an inspiring tale in itself.
It is now the UK’s 2nd largest independent food wholesaler and serves over 100,000 independent retailers with a product line of over 25,000 items and employs over 6,500 employees across the country. Key acquisitions include Batleys in 2005, Conviviality Retail in 2018 and Costcutter in 2021.
Well Pharmacy is now the UK’s largest independent retail pharmacy chain. In the early 2010s, the group was actively looking to develop another UK business segment and identified the broader healthcare market as a preferred sector. In 2014, after a competitive bidding process against private equity firms, Bestway purchased the Co-Operative group’s pharmacy business.
Bestway Cement Limited is Pakistan’s 2nd largest cement manufacturer. In the early 1990s Bestway decided to diversify into other sectors and identified Pakistani cement. It was unable to acquire an existing cement manufacturer and made the decision to begin from a standing start.
In the early 2000s Bestway was buoyed by the success of its venture into the Pakistani cement sector and began the search for further investment opportunities. During this time, the Pakistani government was starting to privatise a number of sectors, including banking.
After a competitive bid process in October 2002, Bestway entered into a joint venture with His Highness Shaikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al-Nahyan’s Abu Dhabi Group, to purchase a controlling stake in United Bank Limited. Over time, Bestway bought out the shares of its joint venture partner and now holds a controlling stake in United Bank Limited.
Bestway has also gone into real estate. With more than 6 million square feet of warehousing space, the portfolio is valued at £1bn and consists mainly of commercial properties with some residential elements and is weighted towards London and the South East.
Close to Sir Anwar’s heart is the charitable sector, represented by the Bestway Foundation, which he established in 1987. It is “focused predominantly in the areas of education and healthcare as these are the key factors that have the greatest impact on social mobility and advancement – a topic that is very personal to the directors. It has supported local communities through engagement with universities, hospitals and charities. It has also established village schools, basic health units and medical dispensaries.”
Sir Anwar, Lord Choudrey and other members of the family don top hats and morning suits for Bestway’s annual charity day at Royal Ascot.
“It has been going for 33 years,” Sir Anwar says proudly. “We couldn’t do it twice – once they were doing maintenance on the track so we went to Paris. The second time was during Covid.”
in his keynote address at Ascot in June 2024, Lord Choudrey said: “Being at the heart of the community is at the core of the Bestway group’s ethos and this why our chairman Sir Anwar set up the Bestway Foundation in 1987, our charitable foundation, which focuses on education and healthcare.”
He revealed: “Bestway Foundation has donated over £42.5m to charitable causes. In the United Kingdom £15m have been donated to charities, schools and university endowments and scholarships. In Pakistan more than 35,000 individuals are annually provided free medical care from our basic health units and 1,700 children currently receiving free education from our own purpose-built schools and college.
“Our annual charity race day at Royal Ascot is the flagship fundraising event in our corporate calendar. Over the course of three decades, this event alone has supported over 26 charities and raised close to £3m – an outstanding contribution made only possible by the support and commitment of our supplier partners. Today, we come together as a community principally to raise money for our chosen charity, which this year is the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award (a cheque for £100,000 was handed over later).
“Bestway Foundation has been associated with the Award for the last three decades and is a ‘Gold Supporter’ of the Award since 2019. The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award was founded in
1956 by HRH Prince Philip. Over 7 million young people from across the UK have benefitted from the charity’s programmes.”
The late Prince Philip has been succeeded as the charity’s patron and trustee by his youngest son, Prince Edward.
Sir Anwar laughs when asked what being chairman emeritus of Bestway really means.
He replies: “It means I don’t have to go to meetings or to the office. It’s up to me.”
But one assumes he cannot skip his own birthday party.
Lord Choudrey says conspiratorially: “Everything is on track – so far.”
