1 The Duke of Westminster
£7,500m
Grosvenor Group
Grosvenor Group, the property giant controlled by the Duke of Westminster, saw its net asset value rise in 2011 to nearly £3bn, though its profits fell by 20% to £315m due to problems in Europe. But the group remains in a strong position. It has £3.2bn of future developments in the pipeline in the Far East, America and London.
Strong demand for central London property continues unabated from wealthy overseas buyers. Westminster showed his ambition to grow his business by appointing a Goldman Sachs veteran to head the Grosvenor Fund Management arm, which manages £3.6bn of property assets.
Grosvenor also made its first joint purchase with the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board since they formed their venture in July last year. Together they purchased Lacon House in Midtown, WC1, for around £95m.
One of the real success stories has been the Liverpool One shopping centre, which opened in 2008. At the time, the group wrote off £165m of its value and it was seen as a white elephant for Grosvenor. But the centre is now full and winning international awards.
The property business controlled by Westminster dates back to 1677 when Sir Thomas Grosvenor married Mary Davies and what was then 500 acres of swamp, pasture and orchards came into the family. Today, that forms the heart of the 300-acre Mayfair estate, which makes up the bulk of the Grosvenor family fortune.
The Grosvenor Group shares are owned by the trustees of various Grosvenor trusts set up for the benefit of the Grosvenor family, which is now headed by the sixth Duke, who stood down as chairman of the board in 2007 after 33 years in the role, although he has remained chairman of the trustees.
But with Westminster’s private estate assets outside the group added, and with the top end of the London housing market expected to grow in value by 30% by 2015, we raise our valuation of Westminster slightly to £7,500m.
2 Ernesto Bertarelli & Kirsty & family
£7,400m
Northill Capital
Ernesto Bertarelli, the Swiss-Italian pharmaceutical billionaire, is moving into British property by investing £500m in his Crosstree private equity firm, which has bought a large Mayfair property for £155m. He is also developing a UK investment portfolio through Northill Capital.
Crosstree bought the West End property 20 Golden Square, W1, in May this year for £20m from Scottish Widows Investment Partnership. The real estate firm is considering proposals for flats, a restaurant and an art gallery in addition to the existing offices on the 22,903 sq ft block.
Twice winner of the prestigious America’s Cup yachting race, Bertarelli makes it into this list not just for his UK investments but in company with his wife, Kirsty. They were married in 2000 and Kirsty – from Staffordshire – is developing her own music career. Her main role in the family is with the Bertarelli Foundation and driving its UK projects.
Bertarelli spent his life being groomed for business – at age six he was reportedly handing out employee-of-the-year gifts at his father’s Serono pharmaceutical company. By 31, following his father’s death, Bertarelli was running the multi-national group, the biggest biotechnology organisation in Europe. Founded in Rome in 1906, Serono made its fortune from a single, best-selling fertility drug derived from an unusual source: the urine of post-menopausal women, specifically from Italian nuns. Overhauled by Ernesto’s father Fabio in the 1970s, the Geneva-based company became the world leader in reproductive treatments and also produces drugs for growth deficiency, Aids-related wasting and multiple sclerosis.
Serono was sold to Merck of Germany in 2006 for $13.3bn. The Bertarelli family fortune is now valued at £7,400m, according to the 2011 Swiss rich list.
3 David & Simon Reuben
£7,083m
Aldersgate
In April this year the billionaire Reubens merged Arena Leisure with Northern Racing to become the largest horserace track operators in the UK.
The brothers, ever shrewd property men, have spotted the development potential of racetracks. Historically, many have been located near to town centres and are ripe for redevelopment. Witness the housing scheme at Newbury racecourse. However long they have to wait, housing is going to pay more than running a series of race meetings. June last year saw the duo buy a prestigious Mayfair estate, which includes the former home of the In and Out Club on London’s Piccadilly, for £130m. Included in the deal were the six properties that make up the 1.3-acre “Piccadilly Estate”.
The estate includes the listed mansion at 94 Piccadilly, which once housed the Naval & Military Club and is known for its distinctive gateposts and five office and residential properties at 90-93 and 96-100 Piccadilly.
The Reubens are considering converting the former In and Out Club into a single “super prime residential property” to target the very strong demand for luxury London residences. The brothers are also looking to float their fast-growing data-centre company, Global Switch, which is now valued at £4bn.
The Reubens have been active in the British property market for the last decade after making their fortune in Russia in the 1990s, where they were dubbed the “metal tsars” for their role in restructuring the aluminium industry there.
Born in Bombay, the Reubens made their way to London where Simon went into property and David started trading in scrap metal. Their foray into Russia, which ended in 1999, earned them at least £1.3bn.
Aside from Global Switch, the brothers have seen an upturn in their property fortunes. They have also been able to extract hefty profits from investments sold before the market crash.
In all, their two main companies, Aldersgate (which is the parent for Global Switch) and Reuben Bros, are now valued at over £7bn.
Other assets take the brothers to a conservative £7,083m.
4 Joseph Lau
£4,140m
Joseph Lau
Chinese Estates Holdings
Joseph Lau, a Chinese property tycoon, bought a Goldman Sachs building in London for £280m in 2011. He is knowledgeable on the matter of trophy assets, having bought a £33m house in Belgravia’s exclusive Eaton Square early in 2010.
Born in Hong Kong, the self-made billionaire owns a 61% stake in Chinese Estates Holdings, making his money in the 1990s as one of Hong Kong’s corporate raiders. Lau came under fire recently after he was charged with bribery and money laundering in Macau in May this year. Prosecutors have accused him of offering a bribe to Ao Man-long, Macau’s former secretary of transport, in exchange for land, though he denies the charges levelled against him. Shares at Chinese Estates Holdings fell by 7.4% following Lau’s arrest.
His son, Lau Ming-Wai, studied at the London School of Economics and worked for Goldman Sachs. He was announced as the vice-chairman of Chinese Estates Holdings at the end of 2010 and also holds an attorney’s licence in New York.
Lau senior is said to own one of the world’s finest wine collections, having amassed at least 10,000 bottles. He also has three private jets and was revealed in 2007 to be among the first seven purchasers of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner jet for private use.
The 61-year-old divorced father-of-five is also an avid art collector. In 2006 he broke the record price for an Andy Warhol work when he paid $17.4m for a 7ft portrait of Chairman Mao. A year later, he made the top purchase of the evening at a Sotheby’s auction by paying $39.2m for Paul Gauguin’s Te Poipoi (The Morning), a painting of a Tahitian scene.
His fortune is put at £4,140m in the 2012 Forbes list of the world’s richest people, making him the sixth richest person in Hong Kong. We have no argument with that figure.
5 Earl Cadogan & family
£3,225m
The Cadogan Group
This year the Cadogan Group will be marking the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the purchase of the family estate by Sir Hans Sloane, the antiquarian, physician and scientist whose collection founded the British Museum.
Sloane also established the Chelsea Physic Garden and, to this day, the four acres of prime Chelsea land are leased to the Physic Garden for £5 per year.
His eldest daughter Elizabeth married Charles, second Baron of Cadogan, and the younger brother of the first Earl Cadogan. Today, the estate is in fine fettle and is now valued at a record £3.4bn. In 2011 its net assets after borrowings came in at £2.95bn. Cadogan saw a 67% increase in profits last year, reaching a record performance of £71.6m. It is now worth almost eight times the £450m it was worth in 1994.
Things look set to improve too, with US designer Tom Ford snapping up an 8,000 sq ft store at the estate’s 201-206 Sloane Street development site. The luxury fashion designer has rented the store on a 10-year lease at £1.34m pa.
Cadogan is preparing to retire as chairman of Cadogan Estates this year, to be succeeded by his son Edward.
The present Earl began his career at merchant banker Schroder Wagg and took on the management of the family’s property portfolio in 1974.
Having inherited the title from his late father in 1997, Cadogan has presided over a hefty investment programme covering the Cadogan acreage.
Past dividends, quoted investments held by the separate Cadogan Settled Estates, personal property and estates should take Cadogan to £3,225m.
6 Eddie Zakay & Sol
£2,400m
Topland Group
Eddie and Sol Zakay’s Topland Group recently bought the Hilton Hotel in Glasgow for £35.7m to add to a growing Scottish hotel portfolio. Hotels are not their only interest; in April 2012 ,Topland bought the National Grid’s Lakeside House office in Northampton for £17.7m. It has also formed £350m worth of partnerships in recent months to invest in the residential property market.
The Zakay brothers are leading property entrepreneurs, having launched their business during the property boom in the 1980s before expanding into the American, Middle Eastern and, more recently, the German markets.
Topland was recently sued by Standard Life over the purchase of a building in Holborn, London.
The private investor, who paid £58m for the building, allegedly failed to disclose details of its negotiations with the current tenant, the Department for Constitutional
Affairs, which resulted in a loss of £17.7m for the assurance company. A settlement was reached in July 2012.
The group is also preparing to start redevelopment work on BlackRock’s headquarters in London after gaining permission in June 2012.
Following BlackRock’s imminent departure next year, the Zackay brothers will start a 220,000 sq ft redevelopment plan for the property on King William Street. John Robertson Architects has designed the scheme, which is supposed to appeal to a range of potential occupants. The project is scheduled to be completed by 2017. With rents up around 7%, Topland’s total portfolio world-wide is valued at over £4bn. In addition, it is moving into new areas such as natural resources and solar power.Taking borrowings into account, the Zakay family should be worth £2.4bn.
7 Sir David Barclay & Sir Frederick
£2,250m
Ellerman Investments
Efforts to thwart the Barclays’ 2011 takeover of some of London’s most prestigious hotels, including Claridge’s, W1, were dismissed by the high court in June. Irish developer Paddy McKillen had taken action against Nama, the agency set up by the Irish government to manage bank debt, another developer, Derek Quinlan, and the Barclays, over Nama’s decision to sell debts behind the Maybourne Hotel group. Nama had taken over those debts from Quinlan’s Coroin in June 2010, and sold them to the Barclays in September 2011 – thereby allowing the brothers to take over the hotels. The Barclays already own the Ritz and now have a strong position in the luxury hotel trade in London.
The once low-key Barclays have become much more prominent in British business since their £665m purchase of the Telegraph Group in 2004. The twins started on the road to wealth in the 1960s London property market. Their first coup came in 1983 when they bought Ellerman Lines for £48m.
They later sold the assets, making more than £250m. Adroit deals with Sir Philip Green increased their fortune and they gained the valuable Littlewoods mail order business for a total outlay, after selling off surplus assets, of around £340m.
They are also involved in several other businesses, including holding a majority stake in UK-based biotechnology firm Trigen and a luncheon vouchers venture in Japan. Although the Barclays’ main operations in media, hotels, property and retailing have had mixed fortunes in the recession, we can see net assets of over £2.06bn (up slightly this year) in their four main but separate companies in 2010-11, led by Ellerman Investments.
We raise them this year to £2.25bn.
8 Baroness Howard de Walden & family
£2,220m
Howard de Walden Estates
Howard de Walden Estates has ridden the central London property boom in fine fettle. In 2010-11, its rent roll rose from £64.4m to £73.3m, while profits rose from £33.6m to £42.6m. Its net assets also rose sharply to nearly £1.9bn.
The estate leases out and manages more than 850 buildings in the Marylebone area over 90 acres. The Howard de Walden family is led by the 10th Baroness, the eldest of four daughters of the late Lord Howard de Walden, who died in 1999.
As of June this year, the estate has been given the green light for plans to turn 64-66 Wigmore Street, W1, into 54,000 sq ft of grade-A offices.
This is but one of several plans scheduled to be completed by 2014, the value of which is now said to be £170m.
Howard de Walden has also let some of its properties on a long-term 150-year lease to Scottish Widows Investment Partnership.
In the past 17 years, the family has clocked up more than £300m in dividends from the company and a separate development company, Welbeck Land, which had nearly £15m net assets in 2010-11.
With the uptick in central London values, we reckon the business assets of the family are now worth £2bn and we add another £220m for past dividends and other property assets to the Howard de Walden family after tax.
But the really interesting question is this. With so many beneficiaries of the estate and few being interested in its running when the present generation give up, are we likely to see one of the biggest central London property disposals?
Don’t bet against it.
9 John Whittaker & family
£2,175m
Peel Holdings
The plain-speaking John Whittaker is proud of the fact that all his wealth is in his assets – not yachts, planes and other toys. But they are some assets – worth between £2.5bn and £3bn, covering shopping centres, ports, airports, the Media City in Salford and enormous land holdings. But there are plans for much more, including a £50bn investment programme in 50 projects, spread over 50 years, called Ocean Gateway.
The Peel Group made headlines earlier this year after signing a 50-50 joint partnership deal with Chinese giant Sam Wa Minerals for a £200m trade centre in the Wirral. The project is said to be the biggest Chinese investment in such a UK scheme, and should see the commencement of building work in early 2013 on the Birkenhead docklands site. The deal was signed in Beijing on May 29.
After gaining control of 71% of Pinewood Studios last year, it emerged in June that the Treasury is set to buy a 19.99% stake in Pinewood Shepperton from Peel at a cost of £24m. This comes after the approval of plans to invest £49m following a five-hour debate in June. This move will also see the studio appointed to act as investment manager for the £25m contained in the Media Development fund.
The low-key Whittaker, who nearly became a Catholic priest, went into the quarrying business before moving into property. In the 1980s, he fought a long, drawn-out, and sometimes bitter battle to take over the Manchester Ship Canal Company out of which the Trafford Centre emerged. Whittaker, renowned for his long-term view and dogged determination in any planning or take-over battle, has 75% of Peel and that stake should now be worth £2.125bn. We add £50m for other assets and past dividends.
10 Ian Livingstone & Richard
£2,100m
London & Regional Group Holdings
Cliveden, the stately home turned luxury hotel made famous by the Profumo scandal in the early 1960s, has a new owner in the shape of brothers Ian and Richard Livingstone. They paid a reported £30m for the property, some £5m below the asking price. It was a typically shrewd move by the low-key Livingstones, who also own Chewton Glen Hotel.
The brothers recently called in a debt specialist to advise them on a £362m securitised debt pile, which matured in October. The debt is the result of a loan secured against a portfolio of five properties spanning 838,137 sq ft. At the height of the market, these properties were valued in excess of £400m, but they are now estimated to be worth less than the debt secured against them.
Elsewhere, L&R submitted a £600m redevelopment plan for their Elizabeth House site near Waterloo in April this year. David Chipperfield Architects has been commissioned for the job, which involves the demolition of all buildings and structures on the site and the construction of two new buildings.
Ian, who trained as an optometrist and Richard, a chartered surveyor, formed London & Regional Properties in the late 1980s, buying distressed assets in the midst of the commercial property crash. They now control a global empire spanning luxury hotels, casinos, Greenwich Peninsula, the former M&S headquarters in Baker Street, and the David Lloyd Leisure club chain.
Since 2005 they have invested more than £400m in the Russian commercial property market. They are also working on a huge £6bn development in Panama. While we can see just under £800m in the 2010 accounts of one of their companies, Loopsign, we reckon that past dividends and handsome gains on sales of assets in Scandinavia, Russia and Cape Town, together with significant holdings in Latin America, should take the Livingstones to around £2,100m.
11 Mark Pears & family
£1,700m
William Pears Family Holdings
The low-key Pears brothers, led by Mark, saw the profits at their main company, William Pears Family Holdings, rise from £4.1m to £42m in 2010-11.
Over the past few years the Pears Group has spent more than £500m on acquisitions, including a £140m purchase of the 4.5-acre Notthing Hill Gate Estate.
The Pears’ family property empire was started in 1952 by their grandfather, Bernard, with three north London greengrocer shops.The Hampstead-based property empire now embraces thousands of London homes, flats, and office blocks and manages buildings for clients such as BT.
The three young Pears were propelled to run the family empire when their father and ace dealmaker, Clive Pears, died in 1984.In all, we can see 30 separate companies in the Pears empire, which between them made £65m profit and showed £875m net assets in 2010-11. The value of the total portfolio has been put at £6bn.
But allowing for any borrowings, past dividends/salaries (£9m in 2010-11) and successful investments such as the $100m they made from the flotation of Facebook, we value the Pears at £1,700m.
12= John Caudwell
£1,500m
Caudwell Holdings
Charitable investor John Caudwell recently launched his Thin Air Foundation aimed at tackling social deprivation issues in London. He did so by stating that if the council allowed him to build two more floors on his 24-flat development plan, he would give the additional money generated to charity. A bold move from a man who has a £120m tax bill to pay. But he should have no trouble paying. In October 2011 he paid £150m for a Mayfair car park, which is likely to be rebuilt as an upmarket residential development. Before the Mayfair deal, he had spent £80m on properties in London and elsewhere.
Caudwell is also investing £60m in Jon Moulton’s Better Capital private equity fund. He can easily afford these moves, having sold most of his Caudwell Group in 2006 for £1.46bn. His remaining stake netted him another £100m when the company, trading as Phones4U, was sold again in March 2011.
It was in 1970 that Caudwell took his first job as an engineering apprentice at the Michelin Tyre Company.
He later became a successful car dealer but his path to serious money came through an early move into the fledgling mobile phone industry in 1987. When he sold up Caudwell was the biggest independent player in the European mobile phone industry. His 85% stake in the business was worth around £1.24bn at the sale price.
Two years previously he had sold off his Singlepoint customer billing operation to Vodafone for £405m.His eight small property companies showed nearly £7.3m profit and more than £11.6m net assets in 2011. With his sale proceeds and other assets we still value Caudwell at £1.5bn this year.
He does hefty charitable work for Caudwell Children, which grants holidays, and provides equipment and support to youngsters with life-limiting illnesses and their families. Caudwell is also planning to spend up to £18m saving a priceless Wedgwood museum collection in his native town of Stoke.
12= Poju Zabludowicz & Anita
£1,500m
Tamares Real Estate Investments (UK)
Poju Zabludowicz and his wife are creating a £60m pair of “his” and “her” mansions with a gallery for their extensive art collection.
Zabludowicz, 59, and Anita, 51, his art collector wife, own neighbouring homes in a north London street that has the local nickname of Billionaires’ Row. The couple have converted a former 19th-century Methodist chapel in Chalk Farm, north-west London, into an exhibition space to show their collection.
Their collection – 5,000 works by 500 artists – is now so large that they employ a staff of 13 to exhibit, promote and look after it.
Zabludowicz has lived and worked in London for most of his life. His father Shlomo, a holocaust survivor, built the family business around Soltam, an Israeli defence contractor. The defence interests have now been offloaded and the family diversified into property and hotels in Israel and Las Vegas. He recently sold a property called the Princess Arcade on Piccadilly for around £120m. He has a number of companies, including Tamares Real Estate Investments and Ivory Gate.
Zabludowicz has also moved into private equity with the launch of Synova Capital, an £80m fund which invests in small UK companies. Equity investments in areas such as card payment technology have also proved lucrative for Zabludowicz, who is on the board of several Jewish/Israeli charities. We keep Zabludowicz at £1.5bn this year.
14 Dermot Desmond
£1,390m
Titanic Quarter
Irish financier Dermot Desmond has part-owned the ambitious Titanic Quarter development in Belfast at the shipyard where the ill-fated liner was built.
Ambitious plans for the development have been stalled by the downturn in the North’s housing market, but a number of apartment complexes have been built, as well as a Premier Inn hotel, which opened in 2010. Belfast Metropolitan College, with more than 17,000 students, and the Northern Ireland Public Records Office, are based in Titanic Quarter, too. Desmond also has property assets in London.
A former stockbroker-turned shrewd investor, he is best known as the leading shareholder in Celtic, the Glasgow SPL club. Desmond has a £12m stake in the Bhoys. He also owns the online gambling outfit Betdaq, which is being courted by betting giant Ladbroke for a reputed £50m. His London City airport operation and a stake in Greencore, an Irish foods company, were sold before prices slumped, netting Desmond £848m. He earlier made £240m from selling stakes in East Digifone, Baltimore Technology,
Manchester United and Golden Vale. Desmond is continually on the hunt for similar projects via his Dublin-based International Investment & Underwriting Company, which studies 40 projects a year.
Desmond also has around £20m of stakes in UK-quoted companies, including a near £7m stake in Great Portland Estates. In all, he is easily worth £1.39bn in spite of the sharp downturn in his native Ireland.
15 Viscount Portman & family
£1,260m
Portman Estates
The Portman Estate retains the 15th position following the introduction of ex-general Bill Moore as chief executive after the untimely death of previous CE Gareth Clutton in May last year.
He had been implementing its strategy of improving and investing in its 110-acre central London estate north of Oxford Circus. Owned by a series of complex family trusts, the Portman estate was slower than the other big London landowners to start improvements as many of its properties were out on long leases.
These are coming to an end and the estate is taking a more proactive role in development, spending £40m on an investment programme at Portman Village, the name for two shopping streets in the heart of the estate. As well as the London property, the Portman estate owns overseas assets in Australia and America.
In all, the property portfolio should be up slightly this year in line with the other quality London landlords, and the Portman assets are now worth around £1,260m.
16 Bernard Lewis & family
£1,250m
Lewis Trust
The Lewis Trust Group, owner of fashion chain River Island, made a £15.6m loss in 2011 against a £170m profit in 2010.
But the Lewis family is doing pretty well after dividends totalling £771m were paid out in 2009 and 2010. It is headed by Bernard Lewis who started work in his parents’ fruit shop after the war.
The family later diversified into fashion and the first River Island store opened in 1987. Among the Lewis Trust property assets was the IBM Headquarters on London’s South Bank, which was sold to Lord Sugar’s Amsprop operation in 2006 for £115m. We value the Lewis family at £1.25bn in all.
17 Jon Hunt
£882m
Bacchus Partners
Former Foxtons owner Jon Hunt launched Dryland, an office rental club, this year. The Kensington High Street premises boasts a café and three floors of offices, pods, meeting and conference rooms and lounges. Membership packages begin at £139 and go up to £1,299 per month.
Having sold the London-based Foxtons estate agency at the height of the boom in early 2007 for £375m, Hunt has proved himself an expert in timing. He made substantial property investments in central London after the sale at the bottom of the market in 2008. That portfolio has increased in value to £360m in the last year.
He turned down an unsolicited offer for his seven-storey townhouse in Kensington Palace Gardens in 2008, reputedly for £200m. In September 2010 he launched Bacchus Partners, hoping to snap up derelict properties across the southeast and east of England and then turn them into housing.
His other assets, including a car collection and 4,000 valuable farming acres in Suffolk, take Hunt to £882m.
18 Benzion Freshwater & family
£863m
Daejan Holdings
Daejan Holdings reported losses of £121,000 over a six-month period at the end of 2011, which is a significant fall from the £29.3m profit it made in the same period in 2010.
This is likely considered only a minor blow to the low-key London property group, which is valued at £481m, with a share price that has held up well since the 2008 crash. Freshwater and his family have a £383m stake.
Freshwater’s father, Osias, arrived in London three days before the Second World War as a penniless refugee. In 1957 he took over Daejan and, when he died in 1976, he was London’s biggest private landlord with 20,000 tenants.
The Freshwater family also has three other main companies – Highdorn, Metropolitan Properties and Centremanor – which had £762m net assets between them in 2010. But we cut the net assets attributable to the family to £440m to allow for double counting and any charitable stakes. To the £823m business wealth, we add £40m for past dividends to the Freshwater family.
19= Lord Ballyedmond
£850m
Norbrook Laboratories
Newry-based Norbrook Laboratories is the world’s leading veterinary pharmaceutical company. In 2010-11 its profits soared to a record £18.9m on £171.5m sales. But adding in the highest-paid director’s pay of £3.37m to the bottom line takes the profit to over £21m.
The £450m business is owned and run by Lord Ballyedmond, who topped this year’s list of Northern Ireland’s richest inhabitants. From farming stock, he went to New York after school and worked for a pharmaceutical operation. In 1968 he returned to Ireland to establish Norbrook.
Ballyedmond’s extensive property and land interests add £200m. He is building the largest house in Ireland, a neo-classical building complete with columns, arched-portico and a domed roof. Dungooley Lodge will be a 27,000 sq ft house second only in size to the 40,000 sq ft Martinstown House owned by JP McManus in County Limerick.
Ballyedmond will add Dungooley Lodge to a growing portfolio of homes, which includes his current residence, the Ballyedmond Castle in Rostrevor, as well as County Down and Corby Castle in Cumbria and townhouses in London and Dublin.
19= Earl of Iveagh & Guinness Family
£850m
Elveden Farms
The Guinness family will be pleased that the Diageo drinks giant is building a new £126m brewhouse at the famous Dublin brewery site. The family had even sold a site for a new Co Kildare brewery but that was scuppered by the economic slowdown in Ireland.
Lord Iveagh is the direct descendant of Arthur Guinness who invented the famous black stout in 1759. Born in Dublin, Iveagh moved to England in 1991 and the family mansion was later sold for around £20m.The family has little involvement with Guinness these days aside from a £300m stake in Diageo, the drinks giant which owns the brewery and brand.
Iveagh inherited the title and around £62m in Guinness shares in 1992 when his father died. In England, he leads a low-key life, though the family has £36m of net assets in two East Anglian companies, Elveden Farms and the Burhill Estates Company. Part of its wealth is held in the £145m Iveagh Wealth Fund.In Canada, the family company, British Pacific Properties, still owns around 2,400 acres of 4,700 acres bought for just $70,000 in 1931. This is some of Vancouver’s prime real estate (valued at around £30m in 1992).
The remaining stake should now be worth perhaps £400m with another £100m for past sales. Other assets should keep the Guinness family at £850m this year.
19= Ranjit Boparan & Baljinder
£850m
Amber Real Estate
The £342m takeover of Northern Foods in 2011 looks like a good bit of business for the Boparans, Ranjit and Baljinder. In the 13-week period to January 2012, their parent company Boparan Holdings pushed up its profit to £46.4m profit on £571.8m sales.
Boparan started work in a butcher’s shop aged 11 and left school at 16. He set up his West Midlands-based operation in 1993 and trading as 2 Sisters, has built it into one of Britain’s biggest food groups. The combined group should easily be worth well over £1bn on its figures, but we clip the value of the Boparan stake back to £650m allowing for any borrowings.
Hefty past dividends and the couple’s separate Amber Real Estate Investments property operation which saw its profits rise sharply to £10.6m on £14m sales with over £85m net assets in 2011, take them to £850m.
22= Gerald Hines
£800m
Hines Europe
For the past 10 years Gerald Hines has been based for much of his time in Mayfair and is now active in Britain. He is working on a £400m office scheme over London’s Cannon Street rail station where his first tenant has just been signed up. Hines’s start in life was far from silver spoon as the son of an Indiana steelworker and schoolteacher. He grew up in The Depression, and his ambition to make money was present from an early age.
His first proper job was selling fans and blowers for office buildings in Houston. But in 1952, Hines started out in property and became one of the world’s best-known property entrepreneurs, bringing fine architecture to the commercial market. From London, Hines spearheads expansion across Europe and the world. The Hines group manages a total of 120m sq ft, around half of which is Hines-owned.
In 2000, a Forbes analysis suggested that Hines was worth around £1bn, and possibly a lot more. However, we stick at £800m.
22= Lord Alan Sugar
£800m
Amshold
BBC’s Apprentice TV show host Lord Alan Sugar paid £20.75m in June for 5 Cheapside, EC2, an unloved City building which he will refurbish and then let. His Amshold property group is in fine fettle with profits rising sharply in 2010-11 from £8.3m to £32.1m. The value of its net assets also rose to nearly £258m.
A Hackney tailor’s son, Sugar was the former chairman of premiership football club Spurs from 1991 to 2001.
Before that he made headlines with his Amstrad operation, started in 1968, which became a leading consumer electronics group selling phones and computers in the 1980s and 1990s. But following the £125m sale of Amstrad in 2007, his business activity is largely concentrated in the property field. Sugar should have received around £36m for his Amstrad stake and £25m for his Spurs shares.
But Sugar has at least £500m worth of property held either via Amshold, another company Amsprop (with £48m net assets in 2011) or overseas. In addition, he has £150m of cash and personal assets including property in London, Florida and Spain. With the rise in Amshold’s net assets, we value Sugar at £800m.
24 The Jatania Brothers
£760m
Lornamead
Lornamead, the personal care operation, is being split up. A big chunk of the business which owns household brands such as Vosene shampoo and Lypsyl lip balm, could be sold, netting the Jatania brothers around £120m. The European and American operations are being sold to allow the Jatanias to concentrate on the fast-growing Asian and African markets.
The Surrey-based company achieved sales of around £450m last year, according to an annual survey of the top 30 personal care brands by the Household and Personal Products Industry. Its British subsidiary, Lornamead Acquisitions, made £1.45m profit on £90m sales in 2010-11.
It is run and co-owned by four brothers, led by chief executive Mike with George, Vin and Danny all actively involved. The family came to Britain from Uganda in 1969. Lornamead buys unwanted toiletry or beauty care brands from multinationals and is worth £540m.
With a £220m property portfolio, the Jatanias should now be worth £760m.
25= Richard Desmond
£750m
Northern & Shell plc
Richard Desmond is going into property development in a big way. The owner of the Express stable of papers and the Channel 5 television station wants to convert his West Ferry Printers site in London’s Docklands into homes as his media empire moves from the capital to Luton.
Desmond’s Northern & Shell company has started talks with the freeholder British Waterways to convert the Millwall Outer Dock site from industrial to residential use. Turning the 13.5-acre site into a large, residential-led scheme could be very lucrative for Desmond at a time of huge demand for housing in the capital. West Ferry Printers, E14, is close to Canary Wharf, which employs more than 100,000 people, and its waterside location on the Isle of Dogs is likely to generate great demand from homebuyers.
The site is now nearly empty as most of the printing presses and print workers have relocated to Luton where the group is creating a £100m Northern & Shell Media City scheme near the airport.
But any plans come at a time of a severe financial squeeze on all newspaper groups. Desmond is not immune from this malaise. He cancelled an order for a £36m private jet in 2011, a year in which profits at Northern & Shell dropped more than 80% to £5m. This was down from £30.3m in 2010.
Desmond originally ordered a Gulfstream G450 in 2008 as his company expanded overseas. Last year the firm scaled back its US ambitions, selling off the underperforming American OK magazine.
Desmond bought the loss-making Channel 5 for £103.5m in 2010. After a jobs and cost cull, he had turned it into profit within weeks. He also made Rupert Murdoch, proprietor of The Sunday Times, a £1bn offer for The Sun newspaper in 2009 but the offer was rejected. He says he will not make another.
Still, the former ad salesman turned publisher will not regret the purchase of the Express titles in 2000 for a bargain basement £125m. Since then he has paid off the borrowings associated with buying the titles and paid himself in salary or pension contributions some £200m in total up to 2007.
We reckon that Northern & Shell could now be worth £300m. Desmond has used his hefty salaries and the payments from sales of magazines in 1991 and more recently (around £80m all told) to build up a hefty property and investment portfolio which we value at perhaps £450m. On top of that he owns the £100m Express building.
A recent divorce may have cost him £50m. In all, Desmond should easily be worth £750m, with the property deal to come.
25= Eddie Healey & family
£750m
Centro Holdings (UK)
This year separating his fortune from his brother Malcolm’s, Eddie Healey is worth £750m. In February 2011, The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board bought a 50% stake in Europe’s largest shopping centre, Centro, for around £593m. Canada’s second-largest public pension manager is thought to have signed a contract to buy Centro near Dusseldorf from UK entrepreneur Healey, who developed the 780,000 sq ft shopping centre.
Healey started out in his father’s Hull-based DIY operation. He made his fortune from property deals particularly in Yorkshire, turning a derelict site outside Sheffield on the M1 into the top out-of-town shopping centre in Britain.
The £1.17bn sale of the Meadowhall shopping centre in 1999 netted Healey around £420m for his 60% stake after debt. Having reinvested some of the Meadowhall proceeds, we can see £576m net assets in the 2010 accounts of three Healey family companies, including Centro Holdings (UK).
