RYLAND Campbell, the entrepreneur highly regarded as the man who safely navigated Capital and Credit Merchant Bank through Jamaica’s most perilous financial sector crisis in the 1990s, passed late Friday night. He was 81.

The cause of Campbell’s death was not immediately available, however the Jamaica Observer learnt that he passed at University Hospital of the West Indies near midnight, after ailing for a short while.

Campbell, who marked his birthday in February, was named the Jamaica Observer Business Leader for 2005 at the awards ceremony held on Wednesday, April 19, 2006.

On Saturday, former Observer Business Editor Moses Jackson, who conceptualised the awards and oversaw Campbell’s selection, paid tribute to the man who, in 2008, was invested with the national honour Commander of the Order of Distinction by the Jamaican Government.

“Ryland was among the first wave of black Jamaicans who was able to unmoor from the middle class complacency enabled by his education, and break into the risk-taking arena of big business,” Jackson said.

“As a deep-rural boy the apex of his ambition was being a teacher, which he achieved having graduated from Mico,” Jackson added. “But then, he refused to be trapped by that paradoxical comfort zone and launched into an entrepreneurial journey that ended in his co-founding and control of the very successful Capital and Credit Merchant Bank.”

Jackson continued: “It was Ryland’s unmovable sense of mission and unlikely pathway to success that made his biography so inspirational. His candidacy for the Observer award was absolutely compelling, inasmuch as he redefined the possibility frontier for other Jamaicans seeking to escape the shackles of generational poverty.”

Jackson noted that in more recent times Campbell, as a member of his WhatsApp group, took delight in sharing with others his deep insights into a whole range of issues — from business and finance to the use of language — a testament, according to Jackson, to Campbell’s rock-solid, old-school education, and his sustained mental acuity.

Campbell’s story, published in the run-up to the Observer Business Leader Awards, had noted that he was born in the deep-rural farming village of Carmel in Westmorland, near Darliston.

The eldest of eight children for Reginald and Perlie Campbell, he learned the rudiments of good character that served him in his later years.

“There was no running water, no electricity,” he told the Business Observer at the time.

Water was stored in tanks that farmers would set up on their land with financing from the Ministry of Agriculture.

In the community most families, including the Campbells, earned their living from sugar cane, cash crops and dairy farming.

The patriarch, Reginald, who died in 2002 at age 91, was “a jack of all trades, one of those versatile persons”. Among his stock in trade: farmer, stock butcher, carpenter, and mason.

His mother was a “homemaker” who also “managed a little grocery and meat shop”.

After graduating from Mico Teachers’ College, Campbell taught at Chantilly Primary School, three miles from his home. He later taught at St Elizabeth Technical High School after which he entered the world of finance, taking a job in 1974 at the newly formed Workers Bank, selling payroll savings.

At Workers he raced up the corporate ladder — from business development representative to officer, to being in charge of the programme by 1978.

In 1979 Workers opened a branch at Black River, and the General Manager Elsworth Williams offered Campbell the job as manager.

In 1983 he joined Citizens Bank as general manager for the trust and merchant bank. Later, he became assistant general manager for credit administration at the bank, while remaining managing director of the trust company.

In 1993, when Tower Merchant and Trust Bank was placed into receivership, Campbell was part of a group that invested in rescuing the business through a vehicle called Capital and Credit Holding.

The business, he recalled, was successful from day one, and for the year 2005 the Capital and Credit group, of which Campbell was executive chairman and principal shareholder, posted net profit of $1.16 billion — a 34 per cent improvement over the $864 million earned in 2004.

In 2014 Campbell was appointed by the Government as toll regulator, replacing Dunbar McFarlane who had resigned.

He was also a director of a number of private companies, including pharmaceutical distributor Cari-Med Limited.

In April 2012 Campbell presided over Capital and Credit’s annual general meeting for the last time, ahead of the company’s merger with JMMB.