Aroon Maharajh

Aroon Kumar Maharajh, was an entrepreneur in the rag trade, the dot-com market and in the arena of celebrity management. Aroon Kumar Maharajh was born on the 6th of February 1967 in Twickenham, Greater London. His father, a South African of Indian extraction, had a clothing factory in Acton, London, Greater London and had met Aroon's Austrian mother in London, where she was working as an au pair. Aroon (who was their eldest son), left Orleans Park School in Twickenham, Greater London, at the age of 16 with only a single O-Level to his name (in Art) and immediately set up his own business making linings for clothing. He then went into manufacturing menswear, eventually employing more than 100 people as one of Britain's largest suppliers of casual menswear to major retail outlets such as Burton's, C&A, River Island and Top Man. By the late 1990s overseas competitors were eating into Maharajh's profits, and he decided that it was time to get out of the rag trade. He turned his attention instead to the dot-com phenomenon. With Stewart Feendy, a former record company scout, he set up a website - musicunsigned - to showcase unsigned music acts and promote them on the internet. The business was run from the garden shed of Maharajh's home in Hampton, Greater London, where he and Feendy would listen to tapes and CDs offered by aspiring young bands and artists who wanted to attract the attention of the record labels. For a fee of £160, selected acts were rewarded with three songs on the website, along with a photograph and biographical details, with an initial exposure of three months. The company took no cut from any deal subsequently signed with a record company. In April 2000 Maharajh and musicunsigned. were among the subjects of a Panorama documentary about dot-com fever, which was presented by Tom Mangold. That October he floated the company on the AIM stock market for £15 million. After the dot-com bubble burst, Maharajh set up a celebrity management agency, which in 2006 became Full Portion Media. His clients included the former boxer Chris Eubank, the professional bounder James Hewitt, the chef Jean-Christophe Novelli, and sporting figures such as Richard Dunwoody, the former National Hunt champion jockey, and the chairman of Crystal Palace FC, link=nm2507478]. In March 2004 Maharajh joined forces with Simon Robinson, chairman of Remnant Media, to buy Fantasy Publications, the Express newspapers' proprietor Richard Desmond's "adult magazine portfolio," which included Asian Babes, Readers' Wives, Electric Blue and the gay lifestyle magazine Attitude, for £20 million. Encouraged by his Austrian mother, Maharajh had loved skiing since the age of three. He also enjoyed shooting, fly fishing, parties and the occasional long lunch. On the 19th of August 2008 he suffered a heart attack at his home, and died later that day at Kingston Hospital in Kingston upon Thames, Greater London. In 1990, Maharajh married Teresa Quinlan, whom he met at a nightclub in the West End of London. She survives him with their three sons.