HSA Group – Ce-UnPac’d : Cepac Wanted A Legal Fight. TCAP Found The Family Machine

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Cepac wanted to turn a disabled claimant into paperwork. Horsfield Menzies brought the employer-side mop bucket. Wendy Miller KC has walked in for round two. Fine. If these fuckers wanted a quiet cardboard dispute, they should not have started kicking the coffin lid from the inside.

The Cardboard Front

Cepac would probably prefer to be understood as cardboard. Nice clean cardboard. British cardboard. Rotherham, Darlington, Rawcliffe, Doncaster. Corrugated optimism. Performance packaging. Smart print. Innovation language polished until it squeaks like a hostage statement.

That is the mask. Cepac’s own website says it is part of HSA Group, a family-owned business. HSA’s own website lists Cepac as one of its UK companies. Companies House puts Cepac Limited at Prince Albert House, 2 Kingsmill Terrace, London, NW8 6BN. So no, this is not just cardboard. This is HSA Group’s UK door.

And because Cepac, Horsfield Menzies and their silk-lined helpers decided to treat legal aggression like a recreational drug, TCAP is opening that door with a crowbar.

The Door Behind The Door

Once Cepac started puffing itself up, the question was never just “what did Cepac do?” The better question was: who is standing behind the box?

That takes us straight to Longulf Trading (UK) Limited, another HSA-linked UK company. HSA describes Longulf as a specialist business unit within the HSA Group, established in London in 1977, sourcing raw materials, process machinery and packaging machinery for manufacturing companies within the group. Companies House puts Longulf Trading (UK) Limited at the same address as Cepac: Prince Albert House, 2 Kingsmill Terrace, London, NW8 6BN.

There it is. The UK pipe. Not gossip. Not inference. Not some deranged late-night LinkedIn séance. Public records. HSA’s own site. Cepac’s own site. Companies House. Cepac sells boxes. Longulf feeds the machine behind the boxes. HSA owns the nice family-business mural painted over the machinery.

And now TCAP is scraping the paint off with a rusty blade.

Family Values With Solicitors Attached

Family-owned businesses love a values statement. They love heritage. Community. Responsibility. Legacy. All that warm corporate slurry poured into the public trough by people who would monetise oxygen if the spreadsheet had a tab for it.

Then someone starts looking too closely. Suddenly the family values come with solicitors attached.

Enter Horsfield Menzies. The HR-law clean-up crew. The employer-side mop bucket. The polished little outfit that helps companies turn disabled people into paperwork, then calls the mess “case strategy”.

And now Wendy Miller KC has walked in for round two. Because of course she fucking has.

Same disabled claimant. Same pressure game. Same courtroom machinery. Same feeling that somebody looked at the file and thought: “What would really get under his skin?”

TCAP is not inside Cepac’s legal procurement process. TCAP cannot prove motive unless one of these geniuses was stupid enough to write it down. But the effect is obvious. Hiring Wendy Miller again lands like a deliberate thumb in the eye. A legal fuck-you with a wig on. A choice so pointed it practically comes with a neon arrow and a little brass plaque saying “yes, we know exactly what this does”.

Very clever. Very subtle. Very cuntish.

Nothing says “family values” like dragging in the same KC for round two and hoping the disabled claimant takes the hint.

Legal Aggression Is The Tell

Legal aggression does not prove every allegation. It does not make every critic right. It does not turn suspicion into evidence. But it does show you where the bastards are twitching.

And Cepac is twitching all over the map. Not just the recruitment dispute. Not just the tribunal file. Not just the carefully sanitised HR bullshit. The map. The ownership map. The director map. The London map. The HSA map. The route from nice clean UK cardboard to a sprawling family conglomerate with doors leading into Yemen, food supply, trade, finance, development money, war-economy gravity and allegations dark enough to make the walls sweat.

They wanted the issue small. They wanted it boxed. They wanted the disabled claimant reduced to a bundle reference, a conduct point, a procedural nuisance, a problem to be managed by lawyers who think humanity is something you redact before filing.

Bad move. Pressure expands the search area. And TCAP fucking loves search areas.

The Names In The Filings

TCAP is not chasing private relatives. That is not the game. This series is about public business actors: founders, directors, officers, chairmen, shareholders, appointees and company-linked family members who appear in public records.

Start with the founders. HSA says the group began in 1938 with four brothers from the Saeed Anam family: Mohamed Saeed Anam, Abdo Saeed Anam, Hayel Saeed Anam and Gazem Saeed Anam. Then move to the modern UK trail.

Dirhem Abdo Saeed Anam appears in Companies House appointment records connected to Cepac, Longulf and other UK-linked entities. HSA’s own chairman material describes Dirhem Abdo Saeed as Group Chairman of HSA Group. Public HSA leadership material says he previously held senior UK operations roles. Mohamed Dirhem Abdo Saeed also appears in Companies House appointment records connected to Cepac and Longulf.

That matters because when Cepac presents itself as a UK packaging business, the filings tell a filthier story: a family-controlled corporate network with a London address, a UK trading arm, a UK cardboard arm and a much larger HSA body sitting behind the scenery like a corpse under a banquet table.

The family name is not the story. The corporate power attached to it is.

The Claims Already In The Room

TCAP has already covered The Quiet Mancunian’s grave terrorism-linked claims concerning HSA. Those claims are serious. They are attributed. They are not being laundered here into proven findings. HSA and connected parties are entitled to deny allegations made against them.

But they are already in the public room. And once claims that severe exist in the public domain, a UK-facing HSA company does not get to play innocent cardboard and hope nobody follows the ownership trail.

That is the problem for Cepac. It can market packaging until the cows come home wearing FSC-certified little hats. It can polish the word “innovation” until the poor thing needs sedation. It can pose as local, practical, industrial and harmless. But Cepac is part of HSA Group. And HSA Group carries baggage that does not fit neatly into a recyclable box.

Yemen Is Not A Decorative Backdrop

HSA is not just a brand family with a few factories and a sepia origin story. It is one of Yemen’s largest private-sector forces. Public profiles put it at more than 35,000 employees and more than 70 operating companies. Forbes Middle East has put the figure even higher, describing more than 85 companies across 80 markets.

That is not a family business. That is a small empire with invoices.

Food. Flour. Sugar. Dairy. Oils. Packaging. Trade. Shipping. Finance. Distribution. In a country battered by war, hunger, institutional collapse and humanitarian dependency, those are not neutral business lines. They are pressure points. Arteries. Valves. Chokeholds dressed as supply chains.

That does not mean every HSA activity is corrupt. It means HSA is too large, too embedded and too strategically placed to be treated as some cuddly family firm with a logo and a values page. When a conglomerate sits inside food security, import structures, development-finance partnerships and commercial lifelines, scrutiny is not optional. It is overdue.

The $423 Million Ghost

There is also the allegation that has to be handled with gloves, because TCAP is vicious, not stupid.

In 2021, the UN Panel of Experts on Yemen made explosive allegations involving Yemen’s central bank, food importers and a Saudi deposit mechanism, with reporting and analysis discussing an alleged $423 million windfall linked to letters of credit. The Sana’a Center analysed the claims and discussed HSA’s alleged role in that controversy.

Then the story shifted. Reporting later said the UN panel pulled back from corruption and money-laundering claims involving the Yemeni government, the central bank and HSA after a preliminary review of new information.

So TCAP is not presenting that as proven corruption. Read that twice, Horsfield Menzies. Maybe highlight it. Maybe put it in one of your little bundles with a tab and a sanctimonious covering letter.

Not proven corruption. But still revealing.

HSA appeared in that conversation because HSA is large enough, central enough and close enough to Yemen’s food-import architecture to be pulled into questions about money, food, currency and power. That is the point. Not conviction. Centrality. Not proof of guilt. Proof of gravity. The kind of gravity that bends every polite little UK packaging story around it.

The Darlington Mask Slipped

Then there is Cepac’s UK labour record. Unite accused Cepac Darlington of being embroiled in fire-and-rehire, redundancy and legal dispute shame during industrial action in 2023. Cepac issued its own statement saying strike action had reduced orders and put future orders at serious risk, forcing redundancy consultation.

Fine. That is their line. But for TCAP, the pattern matters.

Family values over here. Legal aggression over there. Worker dispute in Darlington. Horsfield Menzies in the paperwork. Wendy Miller KC in the theatre. Ownership trail to HSA. London trading pipe. Yemen-scale corporate power sitting behind the cardboard like a black lung behind a clean shirt.

It is never just one thing with these people. It is always the network.

The Legal Machine Made This Bigger

This is the part corporate lawyers never seem to understand, possibly because too many of them mistake billing units for brain activity.

Pressure expands the search area. If Cepac had behaved like a normal company, maybe this stayed narrow. A UK dispute. Recruitment conduct. Labour history. A few filings. A few awkward questions. But legal aggression changes the temperature. Once they reached for force, the proper response was not retreat. It was cartography.

So here comes the map. Cepac. Longulf. Prince Albert House. HSA Group. Public directors. UK appointments. Yemen food-security context. Development-finance links. Labour disputes. Attributed allegations. Corporate denials. Corporate silence. Horsfield Menzies. Wendy Miller KC. Round two. Same claimant. Same pressure architecture. Same rancid little message humming underneath it all.

They thought lawyers would make the room smaller. They made the room bigger. That was the mistake.

TCAP likes boring doors. Boring doors usually hide the expensive rooms. And this lot have left fingerprints on every fucking handle.

The First Box Is Open

Cepac wanted pressure. Fine. TCAP works well under pressure.

This series will not ask readers to accept every allegation ever made about HSA Group. It will do something worse for HSA and Cepac: it will separate what is proven, what is alleged, what is denied, what is public, what is hidden in plain sight and what sits there stinking between the lines.

That is how the family machine gets opened. One company. One filing. One director. One contradiction. One legal threat. One polished lawyer. One KC round two. One rotten little box at a time.

Cepac is not just cardboard. Cepac is HSA Group’s UK door. Horsfield Menzies helped bring the legal crowbar. Wendy Miller KC helped show the shape of the machine.

And TCAP has started opening the boxes.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Sources

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