Vincent Caillard

Sir Vincent Henry Penalver Caillard (23 October 1856 – 18 March 1930) was a British intelligence officer, diplomat, financier, industrialist and company director, principally for Vickers.

After being commissioned in the Royal Engineers, in the early 1880s Caillard was engaged in intelligence duties in the Levant region of the eastern Mediterranean. In 1883, he was appointed to a senior position on the Ottoman Public Debt Council in Constantinople, where he lived with his family. After returning to England in 1898 Caillard entered private business, taking up positions as a director in a diversity of companies engaged in areas such as in banking, agricultural development and railways.

In 1898, Caillard joined the board of directors of the armaments manufacturers, Vickers, where he remained for the next 29 years. In 1906 he was appointed financial director of Vickers, a position he held during the massive pre-war build-up of armaments in Europe and the Near East, and World War I that followed. Caillard developed a close relationship with the Greek arms-dealer Basil Zaharoff and acted as an intermediary between him and senior British politicians during the war. He was politically active in organisations advocating protectionism and opposing trade unionism. Caillard resigned from Vickers in August 1927 after a post-war period of losses and allegations of mis-management of the company, leading to a major write-down of capital in 1926.