Peter Prowting & Family
Prowting
In 1948, Peter Prowting, 81, became a director of his family’s construction company, Prowting, started by his father in 1912. He became chairman in 1955 and the Uxbridge-based business was floated in 1988. After he retired, his family and trusts sold up in 2002 to Westbury, netting £88.5m. Prowting made another £24m in June 2004, when the quoted Estates & General property group was sold to property tycoon Leo Noe. Past dividends and other assets (including £10.3m net assets in Prowting Investments) take the Prowting family to £120m.
Phyllis Somers
Neutral Holdings
Phyllis Somers, 84, is the widow of Nat Somers, who died in 1998. The Jersey-based tycoon had two passions, flying and business, which made his fortune. He learnt to fly in 1936, and later owned airports, but real success came in 1988, when he sold Southampton Airport for £50m. His numerous property deals and a large $20m executive jet are testament to a £120m fortune. His widow is a director of PS Webber.
Tom Wheatcroft
Wheatcroft & Son
Wheatcroft is a life-long F1 fan who revitalised the Castle Donington track in the 1970s after opening his collection of GP cars to the public in 1973.
Aside from motoring, he is a property developer and builder. We can see healthy growth in the net assets to over £13m in his three main companies — Wheatcroft & Son, Turnpike Road Farm and Donington Park Racing.
He leased Donington in 1997 for 25 years to Two Four Sports in a £40m deal. Add to this his £60m classic car collection and his business interests, and 84-year-old Wheatcroft is easily worth £120m.
Richard Barrett
Treasury Holdings
Richard Barrett, 52, is one of Dublin’s top property developers. With Johnny Ronan, he co-owns Treasury Holdings and is eyeing the Chinese market. In July 2006, Treasury Holdings got planning permission from the Chinese authorities for the development of a 4.22m m2 (45.42m sq ft) eco-city on an island 42km (26 miles) off the coast of Shanghai.
The group, set up in Dublin in 1989, is still very active in the British property market, selling three properties in July 2006 for £77m. It has a property portfolio valued at more than £1.5bn.
Treasury Holdings holds a 58% stake in Real Estate Opportunities, a quoted property investment trust. Its stake in Real Estate is now worth £147m. Treasury Holdings is worth around £196m, valuing Barrett’s stake at around £98m. Other assets take him to £118m.
Johnny Ronan
Treasury Holdings
Johnny Ronan, also 52, co-owns Treasury Holdings with Richard Barrett (see above). Ronan’s stake is at around £98m. Other assets take him to £118m.
Thomas Jennings & Family
The Rotary Group
The Jennings family owns the Rotary Group, an electrical and engineering contractor based in Northern Ireland. Thomas Jennings, 52, is chairman of the business started by his father in 1954. It is easily worth £70m on the back of £8.3m profit on £163.3m sales in 2005. The family also owns Cusp, a property developer with nearly £41m net assets in 2004. With £5m of dividends paid, the Jennings family is worth £116m.
James Leavesley & Family
St Modwen Properties
With the share price of St Modwen Properties, the quoted property group, hitting new highs in 2006, Jim Leavesley’s family stake is now worth £83m. He set up St Modwen Properties with his brother-in-law, the late Sir Stan Clarke.
Leavesley, 76, has a stake in Evans Property Holdings, the Leeds property group. The company had £287.8m net assets in 2004-05, valuing the Leavesley family stake at £22m. He is also a dealer in surplus military supplies through Military Vehicle Spares.
With other assets, the Leavesley family should be worth £115m.
Sir William McAlpine & Family
Newarthill
Construction-to-property group Sir Robert McAlpine will be wary of other private finance initiative hospital schemes after losing more than £100m on one deal. It negated the good work McAlpine has done on its £200m contract to build Arsenal’s new stadium in north London. Parent company Newarthill went from a £26.2m loss to a £19.7m profit in 2005, with sales rising sharply to £1bn. We value the business on its £92.2m net assets. Dividends of £25m from 1996 to 2001 allow us to value the McAlpine family, led by Sir William, 70, at £110m after tax.
Frank Boyd & Family
Killultagh Estates
Brunswick (No 1) is one of the fastest growing property firms in Northern Ireland. In 2004, its net assets rose sharply from £23m to £90.6m. It is owned by two very shrewd Ulster property tycoons: Frank Boyd and Andrew Creighton.
Boyd, 52, started as an electrician and still owns an electrical contracting business. His main company, Killultagh Estates, owned by his trusts, is one of the leading property companies in Northern Ireland. In September 2005, it snapped up the Fareham Shopping Centre in Hampshire for £110m. Killultagh Estates had £52.8m of net assets in its 2004-05 accounts. The separate Killultagh Properties is worth its £8.8m net asset figure. Similarly, Castle Glen Developments is worth its £1.7m net assets. In all, Boyd and his family should be worth £109m.
Heinrich Feldman & Family
Inremco 26
Feldman is a London property owner and trader with over 50 directorships to his name. His main holding company is Inremco 26 Ltd, which was incorporated in 1983. It made a £3.5m profit in 2003-04, when its net assets were £78.9m. In addition, there is Castledock, owned by a trust company, which has £21.3m of net assets. We can also see Feldman stakes in a host of smaller property companies worth over £9m. With other assets, we reckon Feldman, 54, is now easily worth £109m.
John Seddon & Family
Seddon Group
Government spending on public infrastructure continues to benefit the Seddon Group: the Cheshire-based construction company makes that very clear in its 2005 report, and it also looked forward to “a busy and productive 2006”.
The business 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, 71, 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 also had a good 2005, turning 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 (though the Seddons take little out of the companies).
In all, the Seddon family should easily be worth £107m.
Sir David Garrard
Minerva
After the sale of Land Investors for around £180m in 1988, Sir David Garrard and Andrew Rosenfeld launched the Minerva property group. It had interests in Croydon, including the Allders retail chain. When Allders collapsed in January 2005, Minerva’s 2004-05 losses were over £49m, while the Allders pension fund had a shortfall of around £58m. In March 2005, Garrard, 67, stood down as Minerva chairman. His family trusts sold £37m worth of shares, but he kept 5.4m shares, now worth £16.4m. Other assets and sale proceeds should take Garrard to £105m.
Tony Khalastchi & Family
Flodrive
Tony Khalastchi, 45, made auction history in May 2003 when he bid £8.55m for an industrial ground rent in Bristol, the biggest lot ever to have been sold under the hammer. His family’s two property groups, Flodrive and Strandpark Properties, made over £13m profit on £65m sales in 2004-05 between them. In December 2003, Khalastchi, along with the Pears family, bought the 252-strong Punch Pubs’ portfolio for £57m. In October 2004, they sold 38 of the pubs, netting £15.2m. We value the businesses on their net assets of over £95m, adding another £10m for other Khalastchi family assets.
Bernard McNamara
Michael McNamara & Co
Ireland’s fourth-largest building contractor, Michael McNamara & Co started in Co Clare in the 1940s. The eponymous founder began his building career as a craftsman, carrying out repairs and alterations to buildings for Clare county council. In the late 1970s, his eldest son, Bernard, took over and in the mid-1980s he moved the business to Dublin.
Bernard McNamara, 56, is also part of the consortium that bought the SuperQuinn supermarket chain for over £300m in early 2004.
Michael McNamara, with a £154m turnover, has been valued at £33m, while McNamara’s property portfolio is worth £62m. Bernard also owns two of Ireland’s most expensive houses. In all, he should easily be worth £105m.
Ron Wood
Ron Wood Developments
A high court judge ruled that the Inland Revenue had no right to charge Ron Wood capital gains tax on a massive share transfer.
The case related to Wood’s £90m proceeds in 1996 from the sale of his Ron Wood greetings card operation, which he had started in 1975. Wood entered into a series of intricate financial arrangements, with the participation of three companies incorporated outside the UK, to reduce his liability for capital gains tax on the sale. However, his tax-avoidance scheme was invalidated by a ruling of the Inland Revenue Special Commissioners in May 2004.
Crucially, the commissioners decided that a Dutch company, Eulalia Holdings BV, which was central to Wood’s complex tax planning, was “resident” in the UK. That left Wood liable in principle to pay CGT on a “chargeable gain” of £23.7m. This was overturned in April. The Revenue appealed but the Appeal Court judges ruled in Wood’s favour in February 2006, so we add that £23.7m and any interest to 57-year-old Wood.
Through Ron Wood Developments, he is building some large developments in the Manchester area. It had £175,000 net assets in 2004. In all, he should be worth £105m.
John Guthrie
Broadland Properties
John Guthrie was the biggest winner from the May 2005 sale of the Merchant Retail business to Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing for £222m cash. Guthrie picked up 10% of the company years ago, when the shares were trading at 9p. The takeover price was 197p per share, giving Guthrie a profit of around £22.3m.
Guthrie, 70, chairs Broadland Properties, a private property group based in Scarborough. He owns all the shares either directly or through family trusts. The business, which was started in 1950, saw its profits rise from £2.1m to £10.89m on sales of £26.1m in the year to September 2005. There was a large one-off exceptional profit, which may have been the Merchant Retail gains. But we value Broadland on its £99.6m net assets. Other Guthrie assets should take Guthrie to perhaps £103m.
The Earl of Portsmouth
Grainger Trust
The rise in the share price of Grainger Trust, a Newcastle-based property group, is of immense interest to the 10th Earl of Portsmouth, its largest shareholder. His stake is now worth £51.5m. At his country pile outside Basingstoke, Portsmouth has 3,000 surrounding acres. He sold some land in 1986 and invested the proceeds in Grainger Trust. He was on the Grainger board but resigned in early 2002 after selling £9.11m worth of shares. With his other assets, Portsmouth, 52, should still be worth £102m today.
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No |
Name |
Wealth (£m) |
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379 375 258 145 299 |
Simon Morris, 29 Jason Hayes, 34 Hugo Burge, 34 Shaf Rasul, 36 Trevor Ashworth,36 |
30 31 55 102 45 |
Shaf Rasul
E-Net Computers
Shaf Rasul runs and owns E-Net Computers, thought to be the largest storage media distributor in Europe and the biggest buyer of DVD and CD-R media in the world. It has long-standing partnerships with the world’s top optical media manufacturers and has recently opened a global import-export hub in duty-free Dubai as well as a £5m distribution centre at Edinburgh airport.
E-Net distributes storage brands and sells to webstores and to large distributors supplying the high street. Already a multinational operator, Rasul has set his sights on the American market.
Rasul, 36, set up E-Net in 1999, on the back of his various property interests in his native Edinburgh. In 2004-05, E-Net made £4.5m profit on £67.2m sales. It is easily worth £55m.
Shaf’s property interests, including joint ventures, add £15m, and other hi-tech operations £12m, while his Dubai interests take Rasul to £102m easily.
Duncan Sinclair & Family
Mountview Estates
Profits fell by 30% in the first half of 2005-06 at Mountview Estates, a quoted London property group, mainly as a result of delays in sales completions. But, by the year-end, the situation had improved as the property market picked up. The business, specialising in residential property, is chaired by accountant Duncan Sinclair, 59. With the shares riding high, the Sinclair family’s 53% stake is worth more than £97m. We add another £5m for the family’s net assets in smaller private companies such as Ossian Investors and Sinclair Estates.
Asif Aziz & Family
Golfrate Group
Thirty-nine-year-old Asif Aziz’s Golfrate Group has sold a prestige building in London’s Victoria Street for £164m, was underbidder on a £400m chain of petrol stations, and bought the Trocadero site in the capital’s Piccadilly for £200m with plans for redevelopment. By mid-2005, the group owned assets worth £620m with a target of £1bn. It is owned by an Isle of Man trust. With a huge property portfolio and extensive business interests in Africa, the Aziz family should be worth many millions, but we settle for £100m, mindful of any borrowings.
Anton Bilton & Family
Raven Mount
Anton Bilton has been busy. His quoted Raven Mount operation, best known for redeveloping derelict hospitals, mansions and churches, is now undertaking work on the 19th-century abbey at Fort Augustus, near Inverness.
Bilton has an £18m stake in Raven Mount, which is looking seriously at Russia. Its Raven Russia was spun off and floated on the AIM in July 2005, and is now valued at £180m. Raven Russia plans to invest £500m in warehouses and logistics centres over the next two years.
Bilton, 42, is the grandson of the late Percy Bilton. Percy Bilton’s own quoted property group was taken over in 1998 for £270m. The Bilton family’s 29.4% stake was worth £79.4m. With these wider family assets added to Anton’s own business and personal assets, a £100m valuation for the Bilton clan still seems reasonable after tax.
Judah Binstock
Investor
Judah Binstock, 77, qualified as a solicitor and ran a flourishing business in the late 1950s. Inspired by his many clients who had made their fortune in property, he decided to follow suit and became a major property player. Binstock began 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 gaming industry (casinos) and trading currencies. He moved to Marbella and started dealing in Spanish property, buying thousands of acres of agricultural land surrounding Marbella. Today, he is one of the largest landowners in Marbella. In 2003, he became the focus of a Spanish police investigation after he backed a rebellion against Marbella’s mayor Julian Munoz, who was attempting to restrict future planning applications. Binstock now divides his time between Marbella, London and Paris. We value Binstock at a very conservative £100m.
Liam Carroll & Family
Vantive Holdings
Liam Carroll, 56, became one of the biggest developers and builders of apartments in Dublin during the boom years of the 1990s. Carroll and his wife own Dublin-based Vantive Holdings and Danninger, together worth around £80m.
Vantive made a profit of over £11m in the year to March 2002. With a £20m stake in the Dunloe Ewart property business added, the Carroll family is worth £100m.
Cyril Dennis
Rumford Investments
A big development in Liverpool is occupying Cyril Dennis, 62. His Rumford Investments is building two tower blocks in a £67m development due for completion in 2006. Meanwhile, in London, Dennis has secured approval for development at Peruvian Wharf, a site he has owned since 1999.
Dennis began his development work as the half-owner of an Essex housebuilder, which he sold in 1987. After a spell advising the Berisford group, he built up his own property business with a portfolio spread across the UK.
In 1994, Dennis sold 75% of the portfolio to Legal & General for £116m, netting a profit of £50m in the process. Today, we can see around 45 small companies including Rumford Investments held by the Dennis family. With the developments in the pipeline, we stick at a £100m valuation.
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‘s top football finance reporter, David Conn, reported that Hunt, 72, is understood to operate a family trust registered in Switzerland, whose value, sources said, runs into “nine figures”.
Hunt made his fortune initially helping the late Octav Botnar to build Nissan UK into one of Britain’s most successful car dealers. By the late 1980s, the business was making huge profits and 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 in jail for his role in the largest tax fraud ever perpetrated in Britain.
Now leading a quiet life, our sources indicate that Hunt, 72, has a huge property portfolio to add to the £2.5m of business assets we can see in several companies run by his son. Taking our cue from the “nine-figure” Swiss trust, we raise the Hunt family to £100m.
Sammy Lee
MDP Worldwide
A short throw from Harrods in London is an ultra-smart development called The Knightsbridge, topped by one of the world’s most expensive apartments — a £20m penthouse. It is the work of Sammy Lee, 47, a Hong Kong Chinese entrepreneur who spends most of his time in London.
Lee, who studied law in Britain and trained as a solicitor, is a good friend of Donald Trump, the US tycoon. The pair are working on a $3bn (£1.58bn) development in Manhattan called, naturally, Trump Place.
Lee is also working on a 640-acre development in Las Vegas. In 2003, he spent $20m (£10.5m) acquiring a 63% stake in MDP Worldwide, a Hollywood-based film maker, which won an Oscar through 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.
Joey Kaempfer
McArthurGlen UK
During the boom years of the 1980s, Joey Kaempfer went from building small townhouse projects to developing some of Washington DC’s most expensive commercial real estate, ultimately landing a deal to build a $360m (£189m) office for a prestigious Washington law firm. By 1989, Kaempfer had built up a fortune estimated at $40m (£21m). But after the commercial real estate market took a dive starting in 1989, he was $1bn (£527m) in debt and had to sell nearly all his buildings to outside investors to avoid bankruptcy.
In 1993, he was asked by a friend, Alan Glen, to help expand his shopping mall operation in Europe. He went into partnership with BAA, which injected $500m of capital into a joint venture, BAA McArthurGlen. By 1999, it had two malls in France, five in Britain, and one in Austria. By early 2002, Kaempfer had teamed up with the Richardson twins to buy out BAA from the European malls in a £200m deal.
Now based in Britain, Kaempfer, 59, has new development interests. Although there is not much sign of huge asset wealth in the accounts of McArthurGlen UK, there is a lot of value in the outlets. Early in 2004, for example, McArthurGlen injected five of its European outlet malls into a €400m (£266.7m) pan-European outlet retail fund set up in partnership with Henderson Global Investors. Given this, we are safe to value Kaempfer at £100m.
Bill McCabe
LNC Property Group
LNC Property Group, led by Bill McCabe, 49, bought the giant Space Park complex in Bremen, north Germany, in March 2006 for around £40m, just over one-tenth of the original cost. The 26-hectare Space Park was built on a derelict shipyard in the Gropelingen district and cost £345m to develop.
It was a typically shrewd move by McCabe, who made £47m from sales of stakes in SmartForce (now Skillsoft), a Nasdaq-quoted global leader in online learning, which he led until 2000. He invested part of the proceeds in other technology companies through Oyster Technology Investments, and he is diversifying into recycling, buying half of Bedminster International (Ireland) in August 2003.
He invested the remainder in property. In 2004, he is thought to have paid more than £30m for a derelict building in Manchester. In March 2005, he paid £60m for a central London office block.
LNC Properties owns properties worth over £180m and has a credit line of about £250m. The company grew out of McCabe’s £85m 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 McCabe at around £100m this year.
The Morris Family
Woodgavil Properties
The Morris family own a property empire that started after the war as a housebuilder. Based in Surrey, the family owns at least 12 separate companies which we can identify, including Woodgavil Properties and Exe Valley Investments. In all, these companies have net assets of over £30m collectively. But sites in Water Lane, Exeter, and in Ashford in Kent particularly have increased sharply in value. We now value the Morris family at £100m.
Shiraz Dharamshi Tejani & Family
LPC
It has been a good year for Shiraz Dharamshi Tejani, 57, chairman of LPC, a family-owned company which makes disposable paper products and deals in property.
The Leicester-based business made £897,000 profit on £109m sales in the year to September 2004 and it shows £69m net assets in its balance sheet. It has also acquired three leading companies in related industries and continues heavy investment in its state-of-the-art tissue production facility. With property and a pharmaceuticals firm added, the wider Tejani family is worth £100m.
Maurice Wohl & Family
United Real Property Trust
Maurice Wohl, 89, was a very low-key property developer in London after the war. He built up United Real and floated it in 1961. By the mid-1970s, he had retired to Switzerland. In 1986, United Real was taken over in a £117m deal by the late Tony Clegg, a brilliant property dealer of the time. Wohl made around £60m from the deal. But he has some hefty private investments and has been a huge benefactor to charities. We value the Wohl family at £100m.
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No |
Name |
Wealth (£m) |
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33 43 123 148 148 163 240 277 299 343 346 360 362 362 |
David Wilson, Freddie Linnett & The Murphy Family Tom Wheatcroft, Shiraz Dharamshi Tejani & Family Charles Yeates Charles Clowes Douglas Woolf & Family Michael Pass Peter Gadsby Stephen Spouge & Family Robert Jolly & Family Michael Coates & Family George Akins & Family Neil Morgan & Family |
520 430 120 100 100 95 60 50 45 37 36 33 32 32 |
Charles Yeates
WS Yeates
Having finished a second award-winning office complex in Leicester, Charles Yeates is a developer in the enviable position of having all his properties occupied by blue-chip clients. He can be relaxed about the state of the economy, he has no borrowings and his various properties in Britain and Spain produce good yields in a low-inflation environment. He is now busy working on more developments in Spain. Yeates, now 70, began in business at the age of 22 after leaving the RAF, becoming a leading dealer in buses and coaches. Today, his Loughborough-based company, WS Yeates, is involved in property and fine art. In 2004, the company made around £1.8m profit and had nearly £25m net assets. Yeates has other overseas property assets and art, which take him to £100m.
Noel Smyth & Family
Alburn
Tax lawyer and developer Noel Smyth bought a 2.5% stake in the Square Shopping Centre in Tallaght, Dublin, held by solicitor John Caldwell, for around £10m. The move is seen as a step towards consolidating the centre’s 38 sets of shareholders.
Smyth, 55, 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. Active in the British property market through his company, Alburn, Smyth is also redeveloping the old MI6 building in London.
Alburn showed £12.3m net assets in 2004-05. The total Smyth portfolio has been valued at £66m, while the sale of a stake in the Dublin property company, Dunloe Ewart, in 2002, netted him and his family £31m. In all, the family is easily worth £97m.
Robert Morton
Investor
Inveterate investor Bob Morton has stakes in 23 quoted companies ranging from Armour Group to Hot Group. These stakes are now worth over £24.3m.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 was worth £150m, though in 2000 this was reported by The Times to have fallen to £50m.In May 2006, the sale of Systems Union, a quoted software company chaired by Morton, netted him £23.3m for his stake.We reckon that, with other stakes in unquoted companies such as Merritts Properties (£16.6m net assets) and Stackbourne, plus various trust funds, the shrewd Morton, 64, should be worth £96m.
Charles Clowes
Clowes Developments
Charles Clowes, 66, was in the news locally in Derby in 2004 as he was linked with a consortium said to be bidding to take over football club Derby County. But a bid did not materialise and the Rams remain outside Clowes’ orbit.As chairman of Clowes Developments, a Derbyshire-based developer, he has a lot of interests locally, and has made some serious wealth from his businesses. He owns all the shares in the company, which saw its profits rise sharply from £7.7m to £13.1m on sales up from £17.4m to over £26m in 2004-05. With a strong balance sheet and nearly £43m of net assets, it is easily worth £90m on these figures. We add another £5m for Clowes’ other business assets.
Jonathan Hitchins & Family
Robert Hitchins
Robert Hitchins recently sold two of its buildings at an office development near the M4 for £21.3m. This was just a fraction of the activity by the Cheltenham-based developer in 2005-06. It is building business parks, villages, and other developments in Wales and the South West. Despite this, the latest profits from the group fell in 2004-05 from £7.1m to £5.6m.
Started over 45 years ago by the late Robert Hitchins, who after the war bought up large tracts of Gloucestershire very cheaply, the company has developed more than 14,000 houses and over 1.5m sq ft of commercial property.
The company, easily worth its £50m net asset figure, is now run by his sons. Chairman Jonathan Hitchins, 56, is here representing the family.
The holding company is Bay Holdings, based in Bermuda, but we assume that this is ultimately controlled by the Hitchins family. We add another £45m to the Hitchins family for other assets, including a £40m dividend paid out in 2003-04.
Simon Karimzadeh & Family
Eskar International
More than 40 years ago, Simon Karimzadeh’s late father started Eskar International, a London-based property trading-to-processing group. Its activities span leather tanneries in the Middle and Far East, dried fruit and nut-processing plants as well as trade in iron and steel.
Simon Karimzadeh, 44, has been in the news in the property pages of late over his efforts to buy the Grade I-listed Apethorp Hall in Northamptonshire for £3.1m, only to be gazumped by the government in the shape of the Department of Culture, Media & Sport.
The Karimzadeh family owns all of Eskar, which showed £125m of net assets in 2004-05. Cautiously though, as the accounts show very small sales, we value the business and the family at £95m.
Max & Malcolm McMullan
Maxol Group
The Dublin-based Maxol Group is Europe’s biggest independent oil firm. The original company, McMullan Bros, was founded by William McMullan in 1920. Maxol has 380 service stations, 50 authorised distributors, and lubricants distributors.
With a turnover of over £400m, the business is still owned by the McMullen family, led by brothers Max and Malcolm McMullan, aged 63 and 55 respectively.
The family also owns half of Castletown, an Irish property developer. The oil and property assets are worth over £88m. Other assets take the family to £95m.
Peter Dawson & Family
Consolidated Property and Gemsupa
Property developer Peter Dawson runs Consolidated Property Wilmslow, an Alderley Edge developer. Founded in 1986, Consolidated saw its net assets rise sharply from £27.8m to £43.6m in 2004-05 and we value the business, owned by 53-year-old Dawson and his family trusts, on the latest net asset figure.
Dawson is also a director of the separate Gemsupa, which showed £49.3m 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 that the Dawson family is the ultimate beneficiary of the Jensal Settlement. In all, we value the family at £93m.
Rodger Dudding
Lonsto (International)
The son of a naval officer, 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. That business is still thriving and at least 6m people a day pass through a Lonsto queuing system.
But Dudding is also the “king of lugs” in Britain − lock-up garages. He has over 11,000 of them and is still buying them at the rate of one site a week.
The lugs involvement 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, Dudding, 68, is also busy with small-scale developments of garage sites, turning them into badly needed housing. Several sites have been sold with planning permission and others have been developed and retained by Dudding. Around 100 of his 800 sites are currently being looked at by the planners for development purposes.
Dudding’s various firms and family trusts have net assets which now total £93m.
Sir John Ritblat & Family
British Land
Knighted in the New Year Honours list for services to the arts, Sir John Ritblat will also be delighted with the performance of the British Land property group of late. Its shares are trading at a record high, valuing the London-based group at over £6.7bn. Ritblat has announced he is bowing out as chairman at the end of 2006. But it will not be retirement — he is likely to work with his family on private deals and with his charitable interests.
Ritblat, 71, began his career at 16 under the tutelage of property agent Edward Erdman. Seeing the bomb-ravaged Bond Street and Berkeley Square in the 1950s inspired him to dedicate his life to real estate.
A new chief executive has taken over at the group and sold off £800m worth of properties since March, at record prices, with a further £1.4bn-worth to be sold in the coming months.
With the rise in the shares, Ritblat’s direct stake is worth around £43m. His son Jamie runs Delancey Estates, taken private in 2001, when the Ritblats had 7%. It had £227m net assets, valuing the family stake at £16m. Options and other business assets, including Chardwick Investments, take the Ritblat family to a conservative £95m.
