Analysis by The Cummins Accountability Project. This article examines the public-facing relationship between HSA Group’s Qur’anic charitable work, Cepac’s alcohol-promotion portfolio and Cepac’s board composition. It does not claim that every HSA company operates under an identical trading policy, and it is not a religious ruling.
There are corporate contradictions, and then there is the HSA Group’s expanding cardboard theology.
On one side, a charity carrying the HSA name has a dedicated page for the printing of the Holy Qur’an. It says the copies are reviewed by qualified Qur’anic scholars and reports that 45,000 varied copies had been distributed by the foundation. The wider HSA family presents Qur’anic education, memorisation and dissemination as part of its charitable identity.
On the other side sits Cepac Limited, a HSA Group company whose public portfolio includes retail displays and promotional packaging for Jameson, Absolut vodka, Malibu and Beefeater Pink Gin. Not merely cardboard boxes that happen to pass near a bottle. Retail theatre. Brand promotion. Impulse-channel packaging. Displays designed to make alcohol more visible, more attractive and easier to sell.
Then there is the boardroom.
Companies House currently lists ten active Cepac directors. There is no woman among them.
So here we are: Qur’an printing in the charitable wing, booze promotion in the British subsidiary, and an all-male board supervising the bit with the bright lights, the retail displays and the profitable exceptions.
Big Cardboard Haram?
This is not a pub rumour
The question did not begin with some anonymous account making insinuations in a dark corner of the internet. It began with HSA’s own public material.
HSA describes itself as a global group rooted in the traditional family values of its founders. Its strategic page says the group is committed to contributing beneficially to society and presents “integrity, honesty, trust, and respect” as core values. Its social-responsibility material talks about being a good corporate citizen and lists education, charitable services, community programmes and humanitarian support among its priorities.
The HSA Charity website is even more explicit. It has a section devoted to Qur’anic programmes and a page titled Printing of the Holy Qur’an. That page says the review of the printed Qur’ans is supervised by qualified scholars and reports a total of 45,000 copies distributed by the charity at the time of publication.
The HSA family’s own university has also reported the foundation’s continuing work supporting Qur’anic memorisation, including a 2025 ceremony for 275 male and female memorizers. This is not a stray cultural reference hidden in an old family biography. It is an active public-facing charitable identity.
That identity is perfectly entitled to exist. Charitable support for religious education and the printing or distribution of religious texts is not something TCAP is attacking. The question is what the group thinks that identity means when the money is made somewhere else.
That is where Cepac walks into the frame carrying a very large cardboard bottle.
Cepac is not just moving boxes
HSA’s own website lists Cepac as one of its industrial companies. Cepac’s own corporate page says it is part of the HSA Group, a family-owned business. There is no mystery about the relationship. This is not an unrelated British packaging company discovered in a distant galaxy. It is part of the corporate family HSA presents to the world.
Cepac also does not describe its alcohol work as an unfortunate technical accident. Its public pages celebrate it.
For Pernod Ricard, Cepac says it created a Jameson display for a St Patrick’s Day wholesale promotion. The display was designed for retail outlets and, in Cepac’s own words, allowed smaller retailers to use components to sell the products.
For Absolut, Cepac describes a limited-edition outer for six 70cl Absolut Original vodka bottles, created for impulse channels. This is not a neutral storage carton. It is a branded piece of merchandising designed to put vodka in front of a consumer at the moment the consumer is most vulnerable to the ancient retail command: go on, then.
For Malibu, Cepac describes a fully immersive Tiki Bar display produced to a Pernod Ricard brief, with colourful graphics bringing the brand and its ready-to-drink cans to life.
For Beefeater Pink Gin, Cepac has celebrated a scented freestanding display unit produced for Pernod Ricard. A scented gin display. The cardboard was not merely asked to remain structurally upright. It was recruited into the seduction department.
Cepac’s 2026 point-of-sale portfolio talks about theatrical displays, store takeovers, new-launch marketing, product highlighters and impulse purchases. The company’s public material is clear about the commercial purpose. The work is there to create impact, interrupt the shopping journey and sell things.
There is nothing inherently unlawful about making promotional material for alcohol. That is not the argument. A packaging company can lawfully take an alcohol brief. A customer can lawfully commission it. A British subsidiary can lawfully earn money from it.
But HSA is not presenting itself merely as an anonymous industrial machine with no public values beyond margin. It presents heritage. It presents family values. It presents integrity. Its charitable wing presents Qur’anic printing and education as worthy expressions of the group’s identity.
The question is whether the values travel with the ownership, or whether they stop at the door of the British subsidiary when the purchase order comes in.
One group, two moral weather systems
Corporations love compartments. The charity has its photographs, the operating company has its customers, the website has its values and the accounts have their numbers. Each room can be disinfected before a visitor enters. Nobody is required to open the connecting doors.
That may be convenient. It is not automatically coherent.
If HSA’s position is that Qur’anic charitable work belongs to one carefully separated arm while Cepac’s alcohol promotion belongs to another, then HSA should say so plainly. It should explain that the group’s religious and charitable identity does not create a group-wide commercial policy on alcohol and does not restrict what its subsidiaries may manufacture or promote.
That would at least be an answer.
What does not work is using the moral language when it is useful for reputation and then treating the commercial contradiction as somebody else’s paperwork. You cannot spend one afternoon presenting a corporate family as rooted in faith, charity and inherited values, then spend the next afternoon celebrating vodka displays as though the money arrived through an unrelated postal service.
The same ownership sits above both activities. The same group name creates the halo. The same corporate structure collects the benefits of being seen as both principled and profitable.
This is not an accusation that the HSA Charity is fraudulent. It is not an accusation that Cepac has broken a law. It is a question about corporate honesty: when the group tells the public what it stands for, does that description include the profitable subsidiary or not?
If it does, HSA has a contradiction to explain.
If it does not, HSA has a branding exercise to explain.
Either way, someone ought to bring the minutes.
Qur’an printing, vodka displays and the profitable exception
The expression “Big Cardboard Haram” is deliberately ridiculous. That is why it works.
It reduces the grandeur of corporate self-presentation to the thing being physically sold: cardboard. Not the sacred text itself. Not the people who read it. Not the charity workers, scholars or students involved in Qur’anic education. Cardboard.
The joke is aimed at the company’s compartmentalised morality. One part of the empire helps print and distribute the Qur’an. Another part makes the retail furniture that helps Absolut vodka occupy more space in a shop. The group’s public language then floats above both like a tasteful corporate balloon, hoping nobody asks whether the string is attached to anything.
Does the version of the Holy Qur’an your group boasts of printing approve of profiting, or propheting, from this boozy goodness?
HSA may answer that the group is diverse, multinational and commercially pragmatic. Fine. That answer is available. But it would mean the religious material is heritage and philanthropy, not a universal operating principle. HSA may answer that Cepac is a separate UK business with its own customer decisions. Fine again. Then explain why HSA’s own website presents Cepac as one of its companies when the group wants to show the breadth of its industrial reach.
The corporate family cannot be as intimate as a family photograph when the group wants credit for its subsidiaries and suddenly become a distant acquaintance when anyone asks what those subsidiaries actually do.
And the boardroom is all male
The alcohol question would be enough on its own. The board composition adds another layer to the public-values problem.
As at August 10, 2026, the active Cepac directors listed by Companies House are Roderick Charles Ainslie, Colin Philip Box, John Alexander Ross Cook, Chris Ford, Stuart Gilder, Neil Derek Marsden, Craig Mason, Steven James Moss, Mohamed Dirhem Abdo Saeed and Mouad Dirham Abdo Saeed.
There is no woman listed among the active directors.
That fact does not, by itself, prove unlawful discrimination. It does not establish what any individual director thinks about women, alcohol, religion, recruitment or anything else. A board register is not a moral verdict.
It is nevertheless a governance fact worth putting beside Cepac’s public language about people, communities, ethical responsibility and doing the right thing.
The boardroom is not a cross-section of the public it sells to. It is not visibly representative of the workforce it repeatedly praises. It is ten men looking after a business whose public marketing includes scented gin displays, theatrical alcohol retail units and vodka packaging for impulse channels.
Inclusion, apparently, is a product Cepac has not yet found a way to put on a pallet.
That is not a cheap point about men being incapable of ethical judgment. It is a point about governance. A company that wants to be taken seriously when it talks about culture should be able to show who gets a seat when culture is discussed. A company that invokes people and communities should not be surprised when people notice who is absent from the room.
The all-male board does not answer the Qur’an-and-booze question. It makes the question about corporate consistency harder to dismiss as a one-off customer decision. The public picture is now a group with a prominent religious-charitable identity, a subsidiary loudly promoting alcohol brands and a leadership structure with no woman listed among its directors.
That is a lot of carefully separated cardboard to keep stacked without anything falling over.
“We do what we say” – does that include the subsidiary?
HSA’s strategic page says: “We Do What We Say”. It says the group keeps its promises and only promises what it knows it can deliver well. HSA also says it does business with integrity, honesty, trust and respect.
Cepac uses similar language. Its values page refers to an ethical and responsible approach, says it will do the right thing by employees and communities, and says its integrity is why people trust what it does.
These are not findings of a court. They are corporate claims. Companies are allowed to describe themselves in flattering language. TCAP is allowed to read the rest of the brochure.
So let’s make the question simple enough to fit on the side of a promotional display.
Does HSA consider Cepac’s public promotion of Jameson, Absolut, Malibu and Beefeater consistent with HSA’s group values?
If yes, what is the principle that makes it consistent?
If no, why is the group not saying so?
If the answer is that HSA does not impose religious or moral restrictions on subsidiary trading, why does the group foreground its Qur’anic charitable identity when describing what it is?
If the answer is that Cepac is merely manufacturing customer-requested packaging and has no responsibility for the product, why does Cepac’s own marketing celebrate its role in promoting brands, creating retail impact and helping customers sell?
If the answer is that each subsidiary is free to operate independently, does that independence also apply when an HSA company is criticised for its culture, governance or treatment of people, or does the group then rediscover the family connection?
These are not theological traps. They are ordinary questions about ownership and accountability.
The answer cannot just be “business is business”
“Business is business” is what companies say when they want the moral drama removed from the invoice.
It is also a particularly thin answer from a group that says business is more than business. HSA talks about a beneficial contribution to society, social responsibility, family heritage, integrity and community. Cepac talks about ethical responsibility and doing the right thing by employees and communities.
A company can choose profit over principle. That is its right. It cannot then demand that the public treat the principle as real only when it is printed in a brochure and the profit as morally invisible when it appears in a customer case study.
The point is not that alcohol products are uniquely evil, that every person who works in packaging must share a religion, or that a company should be forbidden from serving an alcohol customer. The point is that HSA has built a public identity in which faith, charity and inherited values are not incidental decorations. They are part of the story it tells about itself.
Stories create expectations.
If the group wants the benefits of that story, it should be prepared for people to ask how the story survives contact with the sales department.
What HSA and Cepac should clarify
HSA Group, HSA Charity and Cepac are invited to answer the following questions:
- Does HSA Group have a group-wide policy on alcohol-related manufacturing, packaging, advertising or promotional work?
- Does HSA regard Cepac’s publicly celebrated Jameson, Absolut, Malibu and Beefeater work as consistent with its stated values and Qur’anic charitable identity?
- If HSA treats the charitable and commercial activities as separate, where is that distinction explained in its public corporate material?
- Why does Cepac’s current board have no woman listed among its ten active directors?
- Does HSA Group monitor board diversity across its companies, and if so, what are its targets or explanations for Cepac?
- Does HSA consider the HSA name a group-wide responsibility when the issue concerns customer work and governance, or only when the group is presenting its portfolio and heritage?
There is no trick in these questions. There is only the irritating habit of corporate language meeting the public record.
Big Cardboard Haram, or just another line on the invoice?
Perhaps HSA has a perfectly coherent explanation. Perhaps it believes religious charity and commercial activity can sit in separate rooms without contradiction. Perhaps it regards Cepac’s work as manufacturing rather than participation in alcohol promotion. Perhaps it considers board composition irrelevant to its values.
If so, say it.
Say that the Qur’an printing is charitable, the vodka displays are commercial, the values are aspirational and the board is simply the board. Say that the halo is not a policy. Say that the cardboard does not carry the Qur’an from one building to the next.
But do not expect everybody to nod along while the group prints one morality in gold leaf and ships another on a pallet.
There is a version of corporate ethics in which every contradiction is solved by a subsidiary. The charity is over there. The booze is over here. The women are nowhere on the board. The values are everywhere on the website. The profits, naturally, are allowed to travel between rooms without a passport.
That is not moral consistency. It is corporate compartmentalisation with a glossy finish.
And if the question makes HSA uncomfortable, it can always put it in a box.
Preferably one of Cepac’s award-winning ones.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- HSA Charity – Printing of the Holy Qur’an
- HSA Charity – About the Foundation
- Al-Saeed University – HSA Charity celebrates the graduation of 275 Qur’an memorizers
- HSA Group – About Us
- HSA Group – Strategic Direction and Values
- HSA Group – Cepac
- Cepac – Cepac Group
- Cepac – Our Values
- Cepac – 2026 POS Portfol
- Cepac – Jameson for Pernod Ricard
- Cepac – Absolut vodka
- Cepac – Malibu Tiki Bar
- Cepac – Beefeater Pink Gin and Pernod Ricard
- Companies House – Cepac Limited officers