Victor Smorgon

Who was Victor Smorgon?

Victor Smorgon AC was an Australian industrialist, arts patron and benefactor, who was founder and former head of the Victor Smorgon Group.

Smorgon was born in 1913 in Heidelberg, a German settlement in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. His father, Naum Smorgon, ran a kosher butcher shop until the business was nationalized in 1927, with the Smorgon family emigrating to Australia later that year. Naum Smorgon and his brothers resumed the family's kosher butchery in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton North, and Victor entered the wholesale meat business. The success of Victor's meat importing business saw the entire family become involved in the company, and soon Smorgon Consolidated Industries expanded its business to cover plastics, glass, steel and recycling.

By 1995, the collective worth of Smorgon Consolidated Industries' interests in steel, paper, plastics, packaging and property had been estimated at between A$1.2 billion and $1.5 billion. In February of that year, the Smorgon family decided to divest the company. The proceeds of the SCI sale were distributed among the seven branches of the Smorgon family in Australia, and re-invested or used to purchase new holdings under the umbrella of the Victor Smorgon Group.