The honary life president of Bovis Lend Lease died yesterday morning after a battle with cancer.

He joined the British building firm Bovis in 1971 and by 1975 led Bovis’s first foray overseas with great success in the Middle East.

Sir Frank spent 15 years as chairman and chief executive steering the company through rapid expansion in the US and Asia, where Bovis built the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur.

He also set up an operation in his former home town Brno in Czechoslavakia which saw Bovis get involved with several developments.

Sir Frank had an exceptional life. He spent his teenage years as a prisoner in the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps, and worked as a slave labourer on an underground factory outside Munich.

After the war he returned to Czechoslavakia but was caught up in the communist rule where he was imprisoned and sent to a uranium mine after being denounced as a bourgeois undesirable.

In 1953 he was released on condition he took up a useful job in construction or mining and by 1963 had become managing director of a state-run construction company.

When the Russian tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, Sir Frank and his wife left carrying one suitcase to visit their son who was studying at Oxford University in England.

He didn’t returned and at the age of 42 joined Bovis where he remained for the rest of his career.