Joseph Kagan, Baron Kagan

Joseph Kagan, Baron Kagan (6 June 1915 – 18 January 1995) He first came to England in 1933 to study at the University of Leeds, but returned to Lithuania, where he was trapped on the outbreak of the Second World War in Kaunas. His father was away when the Soviets invaded in 1940, and escaped bound for Britain; Benjamin, his father, was the second oldest man in Britain when he died at the age of 109. Unusually, Kagan was allowed to retain the family's woollen factory, leading to (unproven) suspicions he was an agent of the Soviet security services. In 1971, a defecting KGB agent, Oleg Lyalin, relayed accounts of Kagan boasting of his connection to Wilson, leading to MI5 placing him under surveillance, but finding no evidence of spying.

When Wilson resigned as Prime Minister in March 1976, Kagan was made a life peer as Baron Kagan, of Elland in the County of West Yorkshire, in the 1976 Prime Minister's Resignation Honours, taking the Labour Party whip.

Kagan was later charged with tax evasion, though the formal charges were styled as "theft" (of barrels of indigo dye) from his, by then, former company and "false accounting", to comply with extradition treaties which did not cover tax offences. After a stay in Tel Aviv, he was arrested in Paris and extradited to Britain. but his peerage could not be forfeited. It was also revealed around this time that Kagan had been friendly with Richardas Vaygauskas, a former official at the Russian embassy, who was known to be a KGB agent. However, Tam Dalyell in his 1995 obituary of Kagan, believed that he had maintained such contacts to assist relatives in Vilnius; Vaygauskas was also from Lithuania.

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