210£109m
Ken Rohan
Airspace Investments
Airspace Investments is owned and controlled by Cork builder Ken Rohan, 63, who has been in the construction business for the best part of three decades.
Rohan is still involved in property development, particularly in the industrial sector, concentrating on the north side of Dublin. His developments behind the Furry Park and North Ring business parks outside Dublin and land close to the M50 junction in Finglas have soared in value.
He also has a strong UK property portfolio. He worked in the London Stock Exchange before returning to Ireland to join Rohan Group, which was set up in the 1960s by his brother, John. Ken Rohan became managing director of the group in the 1970s but, since the 1980s, he has concentrated on his own commercial property interests.
In 2005, Airspace made £4.9m profit on £15.8m sales, but we value the business with £79m net assets at around £90m. We can see another £7.4m net assets attributable to Rohan in other smaller companies. In all, he is easily worth £109m.
210£109m
Dick Watson & Family
Keepmoat
Regeneration specialist Keepmoat is involved in many large schemes in the North, where it is also the largest provider of social housing, completing work to over 34,000 homes in 2005-06. Partners include local authorities, registered social landlords, housing companies and management organisations that are funded by central government and operate at a distance from local government.
Keepmoat saw profits soar to over £40m on nearly £469m sales in 2005-06. The company was sold in August 2007 to a management team backed by the Bank of Scotland in a £783m deal.
Scots-born Dick Watson, 65, who heads the group, had an 18.26% stake. Allowing for any tax on the sale proceeds and debt in the sale price, we value Watson’s stake at £109m. Past dividends take the Watson family to £115m.
212£108m
Peter Dawson & Family
Consolidated Property Wilmslow
Property developer Peter Dawson runs Consolidated Property Wilmslow, an Alderley Edge developer. Consolidated saw its net assets rise sharply from £43.8m to £49.9m in 2005-06 and we value the business, owned by Dawson and his family trusts, on the latest net asset figure.
Dawson, 55, is also a director of the separate Gemsupa, which showed £58m net assets in the same period. It is owned by the Jensal Settlement, and Dawson was the settler and trustee of this trust. As a result, we assume the Dawson family is the ultimate beneficiary of the Jensal Settlement. In all, we value the family at £108m.
212£108m
Mathias Kraus & Family
Lonia
Mathias Kraus, 65, and his family own Pall Mall Investments (London), a north London-based property group, which made a £912,000 profit in 2004-05, and has net assets which rose from £57.4m to £107.7m. We value the business and the low-key Kraus family on the net assets figure.
214£107m
John Seddon & Family
Seddon Group
Government spending on public infrastructure continues to benefit the Seddon Group. The Cheshire-based construction company made that very clear in its 2005 report and it also looked forward to “a busy and productive 2006”.
The business, founded in 1897 by two Lancashire bricklayers, was incorporated as G & J Seddon in 1920. The modern Seddon Group was created in 1957 and is now run by the third and fourth generations of the family.
It is also involved in property development and managing golf clubs, while Inspired Developments is the group’s regeneration division. The Seddon Group is chaired by John Seddon, 72, and owned by the wider Seddon family and trusts.
The 2005 results produced an £8.1m profit on £212.1m sales. We value the company on its near-£70m net assets figure.
The Seddon family also owns the separate Seddon Properties, which in 2005 turned in a useful £3m profit on £3.1m sales. We value this operation on its higher £32.1m net assets. To the total of £102m Seddon company net assets, we add another £5m for other assets, past salaries and dividends. In all, the family is easily worth £107m.
215£106m
John Marston & Family
Marston Properties
The Marston family’s hotel interests were sold in November 2006 to a Leeds-based hotel group. The 12 hotels in Marston Hotels were sold for £180m in a deal funded by Alchemy Partners and Anglo Irish Bank.
The Marston family, led by John Marston, 72, has been in the building and property business since 1895. Just before the last war, the firm converted four derelict cottages into holiday lets. Out of this operation, its hotel business was born. In 2002, the hotel operation was demerged from the property operation.
Marston Properties Holdings, with £62.6m of net assets, is at least 75% owned by the family, giving a £24m stake. Marston Hotels also paid out a £12.1m dividend in 2001 and £5m in 2002. In all, we value the family stakes and proceeds in the two businesses at around £100m, adding £6m for past salaries and dividends.
216£105m
John Kennedy & Family
Kenmore Investments
Europe is where the action is for John Kennedy’s Kenmore property operation. A portfolio of 92 supermarkets in Sweden was sold in 2005, and the group is now also invested in Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Finland, with a focus on industrial warehousing.
After qualifying as a chartered surveyor, Kennedy left his native Ayrshire to see the world. While working on a ship from Singapore to Australia, it rolled in a storm and sank. Kennedy was rescued and landed in Australia in the clothes he stood up in, losing his bagpipes. After building a marina business in the West Indies, he returned to Scotland to start the Kenmore Property Group. Kennedy, 56, and his family trusts own all the firm, which made £26.3m profit and showed £77.5m net assets in 2005-06.
Estates Gazette reported that Australian property group Mirvac was looking to acquire Kenmore in July 2007 but the global debt crisis put paid to the £300m deal. Other assets, including stakes in companies such as Forthway and Kenmore Homes, take the Kennedy family to £105m easily.
216£105m
David Daly
Albany Homes
Dublin-based David Daly, 57, paid £17m last year for Franklin House, an office block on one-fifth of an acre in Dublin 4, an area ripe for development.
Daly also owns Albany Homes, one of the most profitable housebuilders in Ireland, and has a substantial housebuilding operation in the UK. He developed Airside Retail Park near Dublin airport and owns Kelobridge in England. In early 2006, Daly received planning permission for a £60m residential scheme on the Malahide Road in Dublin.
In 2005, Albany made £19.7m profit on £97.1m sales and should easily be worth £90m. In all, Daly must be worth £105m.
216£105m
Sir David Garrard
Minerva
In August, Sir David Garrard, co-founder of Minerva, capped a tumultuous few years with the launch on AIM of his latest venture – the American Leisure Group.
The developer of vacation resorts, in which 68-year-old Garrard has a 10% stake, joined the market with a capitalisation of £204m. It is the latest twist in a recent series of ups-and-downs that reflect a long, colourful and highly successful career.
Last year, Garrard asked Tony Blair to stop his nomination for a peerage after he was named in the cash-for-peerages allegations, which were subsequently proven to be unfounded.
The son of an upholsterer in Stamford Hill, Garrard went into property after leaving school at 16. In 1955, he joined an estate agency and never looked back. He rose to prominence in the late 1980s at a company called Land Investors, which was sold to the Berger family for around £180m in 1988. Then, with Andrew Rosenfeld, he launched Minerva, which floated in 1996. It became a stock market star with big developments in the City and Croydon.
In trying to develop a huge Croydon site, it acquired the ailing Allders’ retail chain in order to unlock a key element of the site that was occupied by the department store. But the collapse of Allders in January 2005 hit hard.
Having tried – and failed – to sell all the company’s assets for over £600m in 2004, Garrard called time on Minerva in March 2005, stepping down as chairman and leaving the business.
His family trusts sold £37m worth of shares at the time and he does not have any shares left in the business now. Other assets and further sale proceeds from Land Investors should take the Garrard family to £105m.
216£105m
Richard Higgins & Family
Higgins Group
London’s successful Olympics bid is a boon for the Higgins Group. The redevelopment of east London in preparation for the Games has proved a fillip for the family-owned construction group. The company has also benefited from high demand for new housing along the M11 corridor and in the Thames Gateway. The Essex-based contractor and property developer lifted profits from £9.3m to £10.1m on nearly £206m sales in the year to July 2006.
The family-owned group was founded in 1960 by the late Derek Higgins, who died in December 2004. His three sons are directors, led by the eldest, Richard, 51, who is chairman. The company is moving to a new headquarters in Essex.
The company should be worth £100m in the current climate, and we add another £5m to the Higgins family for past salaries.
216£105m
Ron Wood
Ron Wood Developments
Ron Wood, 58, looked like being millions of pounds richer after the Appeal Court ruled in his favour in early 2006, upholding a high court judgment that the Inland Revenue had no right to charge capital gains tax on a massive share transfer.
The case related to Wood’s £90m proceeds in 1996 from the sale of his RonWood greetings card operation, which he had started in 1975 after selling greetings cards on commission while still a teenager. He is now involved in property through Ron Wood Developments, building some large schemes in the Manchester area. It had £404,000 net assets in 2006. In all, he should be worth £105m.
216£105m
Owen Oyston & Family
Oyston Group
Karl Oyston, the chairman of Blackpool Football Club, entered the fevered debate over soccer bungs and bribes that followed a recent Panorama programme. He claimed he had been offered several bribes to sign players but had always refused them.
Not that the Oyston family would need the money, anyway. The question, of course, is how long the family will stay involved with the Seasiders. In May 2006, the Oystons seemed ready to exit. A Latvian banker, Valery Belokon, has sunk £4.5m into the club to take a 20% stake and promises a hefty investment.
Karl’s father, Owen Oyston, 73, keeps a very low profile these days, following his release from a six-year jail term in 1996 for rape.
Oyston, however, is still busy in property development and applied to knock down half his old Preston headquarters and turn the site into luxury flats.
He has made at least £50m from sales of assets since 1987 and we value the Oyston family at around £105m.
222£103m
Paul Leach & Family
Hubert C Leach
Buntingford-based Leach Homes was founded by Hubert Leach, a man of high principles, who laid down strict guidelines of quality and craftsmanship. It was in 1931, while working as a builders’ merchant, that he built his own home and moved into housebuilding.
Today, Paul Leach, his 79-year-old son, leads the business in housebuilding and commercial development. It is currently working on nine sites, with work soon to start on another three. All its sites are in Hertfordshire, Cambridge and Milton Keynes.
Hubert C Leach, its parent company, is a solid operation with profits of nearly £3m on sales of £33.6m in 2006. It has over £51m of net assets and is easily worth that sum.
There are other Leach family businesses we can see including Swanfield (Hamels). As it made a healthy £20.3m profit in 2005, it should easily be worth £25m. Leach-Lewis and Leach Finance, two more profitable family operations, add another £20m of wealth. The Leach family takes little out of the businesses and we value it at around £103m.
222£103m
Danny Desmond
Bride Hall
Danny Desmond started the Bride Hall property group in 1984, and sold 50% of the company to Great Portland Estates for £10m in 1987. He bought that stake back in the 1992 recession for a much lower figure.
Until late in 2004, he owned all of Bride Hall, but sold a 25% stake to the quoted Warner Estate for an undisclosed sum. Bride Hall companies and other property investments by Desmond in the UK and abroad now total around £90m. He also has other investments and assets, taking the 67-year-old to £103m.
222£103m
David Shamoon & Family
Bursha Holdings
After the fall of the Shah in 1979, David Shamoon, now 77, left Iran to settle and work in London. His interests range from shipping and agriculture to antiques.
In 1990, the Shamoon family had assets of at least $100m, according to a Swiss banking certificate. Shamoon also has two luxury hotels in Marbella, including the famous Puente Romano. We can see another £17.5m of net assets in the 2005 accounts of Bursha Holdings, a Jersey-owned property company, a rise of over £1m in a year. As a result, we raise the Shamoon family to a conservative £103m this year.
225£102m
Malcolm Scott
Dunalastair Philip Wilson
It has been a good year for Scottish tycoon Malcolm Scott. Expansion of his business interests into the French Alps has been a great success while his property holdings in Northern Ireland have also grown sharply in value.
After finishing agricultural college, Scott went to learn all about his family’s grain business, with a spell at a London commodity broker. Returning to Edinburgh, he kept working at the grain operation and also started his own business, Dunalastair Estates, specialising in property and land.
When his father retired, Scott took over the grain operation. In the 1990s, he undertook a wide range of property deals in London, Edinburgh and Northern Ireland.
Scott’s grain interests, held via Swarland (Grain Dryers) and Philip Wilson (Grain), are worth £10m. Land and property interests add £79m, while a 50% stake in a planned power station in Pakistan is worth £10m. With other assets, Scott, 42, is worth £102m.
225£102m
Noel Smyth & Family
Alburn
Noel Smyth’s latest coup was to buy a major stake in The Square shopping centre in Tallaght, Co Dublin, where he already owns 18 shops. He paid vendor Quinlan Private ¤320m for the stake and plans to refurbish and extend The Square.
Earlier, in May this year, 55-year-old Smyth spent up to £110m buying the Belfast Odyssey Pavilion and IMAX cinema. He is also seeking to build a 24-storey residential tower in Dublin, and in 2003 was chosen to spearhead a £300m regeneration of the Clyde in Glasgow.
We can see £45m net assets in two Smyth companies, Alburn and Fitzwilliam Finance. The sale of a stake in the Dublin property company, Dunloe Ewart, in 2002 netted Smyth and his family £31m. In all, the family portfolio is easily worth £102m.
225£102m
Shaf Rasul
E-Net Computers
In 1999, Scots entrepreneur Shaf Rasul created Edinburgh-based E-Net Computers, now Europe’s biggest distributor of optical storage products.
Rasul is also making his mark in property. He recently paid £3m for the former Martin & Frost furniture store in Edinburgh, which he intends to turn into hi-tech apartments, equipped with wireless technology, plasma screens and video on demand. We stick with a £55m valuation for E-Net. His property interests add £15m, other hi-tech operations £12m, and his Dubai interests £20m, keeping 37-year-old Rasul at £102m.
228£101m
David Roberts
Edinburgh House Estates
Edinburgh House Estates, a London-based property company, is run by David Roberts, the former chief executive of Bourne End Properties. In 2002, the company formed a joint venture with AWG Developments to invest in retail property. It spent £28m acquiring two retail parks: K-Park in Clydebank and Reedswood Retail Park in Walsall.
By late 2003, Edinburgh House was aiming to increase its portfolio to £500m and was buying into any sector where property gave good value. Its parent Edinburgh House Estates (Holdings) made a £38.9m profit in 2005, when it had £97.8m net assets. Other assets such as a stake in Bawtry Properties should take Roberts, 51, to £101m easily.
229£100m
Judah Binstock
Groupcorp
Judah Binstock’s Gran Casino Aljarafe in Seville is having new lighting installed, so all must be well for the former London solicitor who ran a flourishing business in the late 1950s.
Inspired by his many clients who had made their fortune in property, Binstock decided to follow suit and became a major property player.
He began his business career by trading small company shares on the London stock market in the 1960s. He invested his profits in property and was also involved in the gambling industry (casinos) and trading currencies.
He moved to his home in Marbella and started dealing in Spanish property, buying thousands of acres of agricultural land surrounding the town. Today, he is one of the largest landowners in Marbella, having successfully persuaded the local authorities to reclassify much of his land so that it can be built on. In 2003, though, he courted controversy when he became the focus of a Spanish police investigation after he had backed a rebellion against Marbella’s mayor Julian Munoz, who was attempting to restrict future planning applications.
Binstock, 79, now divides his time between Marbella, London and Paris. We still value him at a very conservative £100m.
229£100m
Rodger Dudding
Lonsto International
The son of a naval officer, 69-year-old Rodger Dudding took a craft apprenticeship in naval engineering from 1954 to 1959 at Chatham’s naval dockyard. He regards it as invaluable experience, “keeping one on the straight and narrow, and instilling discipline”, he contends.
After his naval career was cut short by injury, Dudding went into business before launching Lonsto (International), which makes and installs ticket and queue management systems used by banks and supermarkets. At least 6m people a day pass through a Lonsto queuing system.
But Dudding is also the UK king of LUGs – or lock-up garages. He has around 12,000 and is still buying them at the rate of one site a week. The LUGs came about by accident in 1975 when a friend suggested Dudding should buy a block of lock-ups in south London. He realised that the garage business was fragmented and not regarded as a serious business. Single-handedly, he changed all that. Today, he is also busy with small-scale developments of garage sites, turning them into badly needed housing. Dudding’s various firms and family trusts have net assets of £100m.
229£100m
Michael Hunt & Family
Hippo Golf (Europe)
In 2005, Michael Hunt’s name was linked by the press to a Panama-registered company, the ABC Corporation, which lent £15m and £10m respectively to football clubs Queens Park Rangers and Derby County. ABC also has a mortgage on their grounds.
The Independent reported that Hunt is understood to operate a family trust registered in Switzerland, whose size, the sources said, runs into “nine figures”. Hunt made his fortune initially helping the late Octav Botnar build Nissan UK into one of Britain’s most successful car dealers. By the late 1980s, the Sussex-based business was worth over £1bn. It generated huge dividends and Hunt had a 13% stake before the whole operation unravelled.
Hunt was sentenced to eight years for his role in the largest tax fraud ever perpetrated in Britain. Now 73 and leading a quiet life, our sources indicate that he has a huge property portfolio to add to the £2.5m of business assets we can see in several companies run by his son, including Groundspark, Autozones 2000 and Fora Consumer Products. We raise the Hunt family to £100m.
229£100m
Albert Hay & Family
Capital & City
Having trained as a chartered surveyor, Albert Hay, 60, is now rated highly in the private London property network. He invests, develops and trades in a low-profile manner but, ironically, he is the man behind one of the most high-profile developments in the capital, having developed a prime residential and leisure block in Davies Street, Mayfair, and let it to celebrity haunt Cipriani.
Hay and his family now own all of Capital & City, a London property group, and a 35% stake of the separate Capital & London. The net assets of the two is £90m and the Hay family stake is worth £65m.
With other property investments of around £35m, we value the Hay family at £100m.
229£100m
Joey Kaempfer
McArthur Glen
Joey Kaempfer, founder and chairman of McArthur Glen, started his career in the office market in Washington DC and went from building small townhouse projects to developing some of the city’s most expensive commercial real estate.
By 1989, Kaempfer had built a fortune estimated at $40m but, after the commercial real estate market took a dive in 1989, he was $1bn in debt and had to sell nearly all his buildings. But Kaempfer found a new route to success.
Asked in 1993 by a friend, Alan Glen, to help expand his shopping mall operation in Europe, Kaempfer found a continent ripe for designer discount shopping. He went into partnership with BAA, the British Airports Authority, which injected $500m of capital into a joint venture – BAA McArthur Glen. By 1999 it had two malls in France, five in Britain and one in Austria. Kaempfer was by then Europe’s biggest outlet man.
By early 2002, he had teamed up with the Richardson twins to buy out BAA from the European malls in a £200m deal. Now UK-based, 60-year-old Kaempfer has new development interests under way in Berlin, Salzburg, Venice and Florence. We value him at £100m.
229£100m
Charles Kenny & Family
Clancourt Group
Limerick’s Parkway Shopping Centre was sold in June 2006 by Charles Kenny’s Clancourt Group, in one of Ireland’s biggest retail transactions of the year. The price is believed to have exceeded £38m.
Kenny and his family own most of Clancourt Group Holdings, which has a commercial property portfolio based in Dublin.
Clancourt had £243m net assets in 2005. Cautiously, we value 71-year-old Kenny and his family at around £100m.
229£100m
Sammy Lee
MDP Worldwide
A short throw from Harrods is a new ultra-smart development called The Knightsbridge, which features one of the world’s most expensive apartments in the shape of a £20m penthouse. It is the work of Sammy Lee, 49, a Hong Kong Chinese entrepreneur.
Lee is a good friend of US tycoon Donald Trump and the pair are working on a $3bn development in Manhattan called, naturally, Trump Place. Lee is also working on a 640-acre development in Las Vegas.
In 2003, he spent $20m on acquiring a 63% stake in MDP Worldwide, a Hollywood-based film maker, which promptly netted an Oscar in the shape of Charlize Theron in the film Monster. The success of the Knightsbridge and Manhattan projects will lift Lee’s wealth considerably. He should be worth at least £100m right now.
229£100m
Bill McCabe
LNC Property Group
A property company led by hi-tech entrepreneur Bill McCabe bought a German leisure park for around £40m, or just over one-tenth of the development’s original cost (£345m). LNC Property Group, which McCabe chairs, bought the giant Space Park complex in Bremen in March 2006.
It was a typically shrewd move by Dublin-based McCabe. He made £47m from judicious sales of stakes in SmartForce (now Skillsoft) and invested part of the proceeds in other emerging technology companies through Oyster Technology Investments.
He also bought a central London office block for €80m in March 2005. Glasgow-based LNC Properties, which is controlled by McCabe, sealed the deal for the 84,000 sq ft building.
LNC owns properties worth over €260m and has a credit line of about €340m. The company grew out of McCabe’s €117m purchase of a mixed property portfolio from Scottish Life in 1999.
LNC made a £3m profit on £3.3m sales in 2004-05. We value 50-year-old McCabe at around £100m this year.
229£100m
Robert Morton
Merritts Properties
Inveterate investor Bob Morton, 65, has stakes in 24 quoted companies ranging from Armour Group to Lorien. These stakes are now worth around £27.5m.
Morton, who left school at 16, qualified as a chartered accountant. He teamed up with a client to go into business, and has been buying and selling companies ever since. At the height of the dot.com boom, Morton’s stakes were worth £150m. We reckon that, with other stakes in unquoted companies such as Merritts Properties and Stackbourne (with nearly £20m net assets between them in 2005-06) plus various trust funds, Morton should be worth £100m.
229£100m
Andrew Rosenfeld
Minerva
Andrew Rosenfeld, the former chief executive of the quoted property group Minerva, is now based in Geneva where he has set up Air Capital, which is funded initially by his own fortune, to invest in the property market.
Rosenfeld, 45, a chartered surveyor by training, was long regarded as one of the brightest young stars on the property market. With co-founder Sir David Garrard, he floated Minerva on the stock market in 1996.
The pair effectively put the company up for sale in 2004 but no bidders materialised at the £600m asking price.
Following losses resulting from the collapse of the Allders department store group that Minerva had bought, Rosenfeld relinquished his executive duties at Minerva in 2005 and his family trusts sold £35m worth of shares.
He is not listed as a shareholder any more under his own name. But if he had kept that stake it would be worth over £21m, as Minerva’s shares have since soared to record highs. With other assets and interests, we value him at around £100m after tax.
229£100m
Michael Slade
Helical Bar
In July, Helical Bar chief executive Mike Slade, 61, took home a £10m annual pay packet, after he steered the company to record gains. He followed this a month later with success in his other love, sailing. He completed the 608-mile Rolex Fastnet Race in record time.
Helical has grown from strength to strength under Slade. It is developing a big office scheme at Ropemaker Place in the City, as well as five retirement villages, three new office schemes, seven shopping centres and three residential schemes. In addition, it has set up a new joint venture to build retail parks in Poland.
Slade has a £61m stake in the London-based operation. His past hefty salaries, stakes in other ventures, plus his own property and sailing assets, should easily take him to £100m and probably well beyond.
