Frank Lowy

Sir Frank P. Lowy (born 22 October 1930) is an Australian-Israeli businessman of Jewish Slovak-Hungarian origins and the former long-time chairman of Westfield Corporation, a global shopping centre company with US$29.3billion of assets under management in the United States, United Kingdom and Europe.

He made his way to France in 1946, where he boarded the ship Yagur, heading for Mandatory Palestine.

However, he was caught on route by the British authorities and interned in a detention camp in Cyprus.

Lowy joined the Haganah, and then the Golani Brigade, and fought in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War in the Galilee and Gaza.

In 1952, Lowy left Israel and joined his family, who had left Europe for Australia and started a business delivering small goods.

In 1953, he met fellow immigrant John Saunders.

The pair became business partners, eventually creating Westfield Development Corporation through the development of a shopping centre at Blacktown in Sydney's western suburbs.

Lowy married Shirley Rusanow in 1954, having met at a Jewish dance when he was 21.

They have three sons, Peter and Steven, who managed the Westfield business, and David, who manages the family's private investments.

His wife was the founder of the Chai Foundation which is dedicated to finding and funding research into effective but less toxic forms of cancer therapy.

His son Peter, is chairman of Tribe Media Corp, the parent of the Jewish Journal and served as chairman of the University of Judaism.

Over the next 30 years, Lowy and Saunders developed shopping centres across Australia and the United States (from 1977); and listed the company on the Australian Stock Exchange in 1960 as Westfield Development Corporation.

Hakoah played in the National Soccer League between 1977 and 1986.

In the 1980's Lowy was president of the Hakoah Social Club, which was attached to the Hakoah Sydney City East FC football team.

Lowy has appeared on the Financial Review Rich List, formerly the BRW Rich 200 list, every year since it was first published in 1983.

Saunders sold his interests and left the company in 1987.

In the 1990s Lowy took the company to New Zealand, then the United Kingdom in the 2000s.

Lowy was appointed a Director of the Reserve Bank of Australia in 1995, was reappointed in 2000 and 2003, and concluded his term in 2005.

In 2008 Lowy and related interests were mentioned in documents stolen from the LGT Bank of Liechtenstein by a former employee.

A subsequent US Senate probe and an Australian Taxation Office audit investigated Lowy and his sons, David and Steven, on their involvement with financial institutions in tax havens located in Liechtenstein and Switzerland.

Lowy maintained he had not done anything wrong, the matter was settled with the ATO, and no action was taken.

After turning 80 in October 2010, Lowy officially stood down as executive chairman of the Westfield Group effective May 2011, taking on the role of non-executive chairman.

Sons, Steven and Peter, became joint chief executives.

In an Australian television production broadcast in 2010, called Family Confidential, it was revealed that Lowy had kept a secret about his survival in Nazi occupied Hungary.

As a 13-year-old boy, Lowy had never known about the loss of his father, Hugo Lowy, who was beaten to death at Auschwitz concentration camp for refusing to leave his Jewish prayer shawl (Talit and Tefilin) behind.

As a mark of respect to Hugo Lowy and other Hungarian Jews, Lowy commissioned the restoration of a railway wagon that had transported Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, and placed the wagon on site at the former concentration camp.

In 2010, the BRW magazine measured Lowy's net worth at A$5.04 billion, making him Australia's richest person at that time.

In April 2013, Lowy attended the March of the Living, where he shared the story of how his father perished during the Holocaust, with thousands of young students from around the world who had gathered in Auschwitz-Birkenau to observe Holocaust Remembrance Day.

In October 2015, Lowy stepped down as the chairman of the Scentre Group, a role that he had held for 55 years.

In 2016 his net worth was assessed as A$8.26 billion on the BRW Rich 200 list; and the same net worth the following year when the list was renamed as the Financial Review Rich List.

In June 2018 Westfield Corporation was acquired by French company Unibail-Rodamco.

Lowy was the inaugural chairman of Scentre Group, the owner and manager of Westfield-branded shopping centres in Australia and New Zealand.

With an assessed net worth of A$9.33billion in 2023, Lowy was ranked as the tenth richest Australian according to the Financial Review Rich List; having been the richest person in Australia during 2010.

Lowy moved to Israel at the end of 2018.

Forbes Asia magazine assessed Lowy's net worth at US$6.5billion in January 2019 and placed him fourth in its Australia's 50 Richest people.

Lowy is the founder of the Lowy Institute, Australia's leading foreign affairs think tank, which has alternatively been described as "neoliberal", "centre-right" leaning or "reactionary".

Lowy is also chairman of the Institute for National Securities Studies, an independent academic institute that studies key issues relating to Israel's national security and Middle East affairs.

Lowy was born in Czechoslovakia (in what is now Slovakia), and was forced to live in a ghetto in Hungary during World War II.

In What Will Become of Us, a documentary screened at the 2019 Sydney Film Festival, Lowy spoke openly of the trauma of gradually losing his wife.

Lady Lowy died in Tel Aviv in December 2020, after a long battle with dementia.