Owen John Oyston (born 3 January 1934) is an English former businessman best known as the former majority owner of Blackpool Football Club. Oyston was convicted of rape and indecent assault of a 16-year-old girl in 1996. He served three years and six months of a six-year sentence in prison. He was released after a judicial review of the parole board's refusal to grant parole. On 25 February 2019, Oyston and his daughter, Natalie Christopher, were removed from the board of Blackpool Football Club. Early life Oyston was born in County Durham, but his family moved to Blackpool when he was two. He was educated at St Joseph's College in the town. He opted out of further education at sixteen and started his career as an actor. In the 1950s, he moved to London, where he started his business career as a sewing-machine salesman; however, the firm failed, and in 1960 he moved home to Blackpool. Career Following his conviction for rape and subsequent release from prison, Oyston continued to operate his various businesses. He returned to estate agencies and glossy magazines. He relaunched Oyston's estate agency and revived two previously low-profile Ridings Publications titles, The Lancashire Magazine and The Yorkshire Ridings Magazine, with managers and journalists who previously worked with him on the "Life" series of county magazines. Estate agent After undertaking various sales jobs based in or around Blackpool, Oyston had considerable success in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in the estate agency business. By the mid-1980s Oyston's Estate Agents had become the largest firm of family-owned estate agents in the United Kingdom. In 1987, he sold Oyston's Estate Agents for an estimated £37 million to Royal Insurance, just weeks before the stock market crash. Publishing Oyston built up holdings in publishing, including the Lancashire Life series of magazines, before selling them in 2000 to the Archant Publishing Company. He was a major investor in the News on Sunday, a struggling left-wing tabloid newspaper. It had been launched in April 1987 and had been kept afloat during the 1987 general election campaign thanks to the extension of a loan from the Transport and General Workers Union. However, after the election, it went bankrupt and Oyston then bought it outright. Just five months later, in November 1987, it ceased publication. He was a major investor in, and chief executive of, Miss World’s international beauty pageant through Trans World Communications