London’s trophy property market is booming as this the 12th annual Estates Gazette Rich List confirms. The richest 250 in the UK property world is now a roll call of some of the wealthiest tycoons on the planet, such is their appetite for London’s prestige sites. In one week recently, the Gherkin was sold to a Brazilian billionaire for £726m while Canary Wharf is again in play, which will make its foreign billionaire owners even richer.
Our new number one is the low-key Spanish founder of the Zara fashion chain, Amancio Ortega, spending at least part of his £35.7bn fortune on London assets.
Such has been the influx of European and Asian wealth into this London property market that the Duke of Westminster (our regular number one until two years ago) can only make it into the 2014 rankings at number seven with his £8.4bn fortune. In all there are 15 multimillionaires or billionaires from the Asian subcontinent, with Indian tycoons making their mark this year, led by Mangal Lodha, the new owner of the former Canadian High Commission building in Mayfair.
The total wealth of our 250 tycoons in this year’s list has risen to £218.3bn. That represents about the same as the total income tax collected by the Inland Revenue this year with about half the National Insurance receipts thrown in too. This year’s total is some 35% up on last year, reflecting that influx of the foreign London-owning billionaires into our rankings.
Our bottom line is now a “mere” £100m (up from £83m last year) while the total number of billionaires is up from 29 to 37. It is also very meritocratic list: only 60 of the 250 inherited their wealth. So read on to see who makes it this year.
Dr Philip Beresford
1 £35,777m Amancio Ortega
Ponte Gadea/Inditex
Devonshire House in Piccadilly was the London residence of the Dukes of Devonshire in the 18th and 19th centuries. Built for the third duke in the Palladian style, it was completed around 1740. Around 180 years later the ninth duke had to sell up facing death duties and the gambling debts of the seventh duke.
A price of £750,000 was agreed and the building was later demolished and a new office block built on the site in 1924. Fast forward nearly 90 years to late 2013 and that office block, also called Devonshire House, W1, was snapped up in a £410m deal. The connection with the cream of the British aristocracy had long gone for the new owner was born on decidedly the wrong side of the tracks. The son of a railway worker in Spain, Amancio Ortega is the majority shareholder in Inditex, the company behind the Zara fashion chain. And through his Ponte Gadea Group, he is also building a property portfolio that includes Devonshire House. Ponte Gadea itself has assets of $5.3bn (£3.4bn) and it develops real estate projects in cosmopolitan cities, including Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, New York City and London.
Devonshire House was not Ortega’s first purchase in London. In 2006 he bought 100 Wood Street, EC2, for around £140m, £15m above the asking price. In 2011 he bought a £220m Oxford Street office block. Ponte Gadea recently swooped in with an offer to buy mining giant Rio Tinto’s St James’s HQ for around £250m. Ortega will also sell and earlier this year agreed a £45m sale of Abacus House in Gutter Lane, EC2. He holds another $1,255bn of property assets via Partler real estate and privately.
In all his property empire is valued at $6.56bn or more than £4.06bn. This is about the same as the value of Earl Cadogan’s 90-acre Chelsea estate. But there is much more to Ortega than this large property portfolio. After opening his first Zara store with his partner and late brother in the northern Spanish city of La Coruna in 1975 (he had started in fashion at 14 as a shop hand for a local shirt maker), he went on to build a fashion empire that now includes 6,500 shops in 88 countries. The secret of Inditex (which also has another seven marques including Massimo Dutti, Pull & Bear, Bershka and Stradivarius, is multiple refinements of its range through the year according to customer feedback. By manufacturing more than half of its clothing in Europe and North Africa, Inditex can get its products designed at its headquarters into the stores in just three weeks. Allied to the 100% bonuses that store mangers can earn for hitting sales targets, and a potent retail force is unleashed.
Inditex floated on the Madrid stock market in 2001 and Ortega retains a near 60% stake in the business now worth nearly £31bn. Famously reclusive (he has never given an interview) Ortega at 78 is now a non-executive director. But he can be found in casual wear, having lunch in the staff canteen at Inditex’s futuristic headquarters at Arteixo within La Corunna. Here, 6,000 of Inditex’s 128,000 staff worldwide are employed. Ortega’s fortune is around £35.7bn, making him the richest person in Europe and fourth in the world.
He also heads the 2014 EG Rich List by way of his London property forays.
2 £9,390 Joseph Safra
Safra Group
The Gherkin, at 30 St Mary Axe, EC3, was sold for £726m last month to the Safra Group, a company controlled by Brazilian banking billionaire Joseph Safra. The Gherkin purchase marks Safra Group’s latest foray into the London property market. It already owns buildings in upmarket locations such as New Bond Street, W1. Safra arrived in Brazil in his 20s as a migrant from Lebanon. He continued the family’s banking empire, started by his great-uncle Ezra in Syria, by establishing Banco Safra, now Brazil’s eighth-largest bank with more than $50bn (£32bn) in assets catering primarily to private clients. Safra Group said in a statement: “The acquisition of 30 St Mary Axe is consistent with our real estate strategy of investing in properties that are truly special – at the best locations within great cities.” In 2013, Safra’s family acquired more than a dozen properties in the US, primarily in New York City. The family also owns a portfolio of commercial real estate in Brazil. Safra’s fortune is estimated to be £9,390m.
3 £9,370m Ernesto & Kirsty Bertarelli & family
Crosstree Real Estate
Ernesto Bertarelli’s Crosstree Real Estate Partners won the battle to buy Camden Town Hall annexe opposite King’s Cross St Pancras Station, NW1, in early 2014. The asking price, likely to have been more than £40m, would be no deterrent for Bertarelli. The Italian-born, but later Swiss-raised, pharma king took over his family pharmaceutical company Serono in 1996 aged 31 from his terminally ill father. Ten years later it was sold to Merck of Germany for $13.3bn (£8.5bn), netting the Bertarelli family $8.6bn. They had already made nearly $1bn from selling shares at Serono’s stock market float in 2000. It was then that Bertarelli married Kirsty, a former Miss UK and now songwriter. In 2011 the Bertarelli family put £500m into Crosstree for its property activities. In 2011-12 Crosstree purchased three London sites for a total of more than £220m. Among them was 1-3 Berkeley Street, W1, costing around £150m. In 2013 Crosstree spent £83.5m buying 48 Dover Street, W1, next to its Berkeley Street building. The combined site is being redeveloped and should be worth £600m on completion. The family established Geneva-based Ares Life Sciences in 2008, which owns stakes in two publicly traded European life sciences companies, including 15% of Santhera Pharmaceuticals and 76% of Stallergenes. Ares also recently bought a 30% stake in Euromedic International, in a deal valuing the business at €1bn (£0.8bn). Ares already had a 60% stake. Bertarelli is also developing a UK investment portfolio through Northill Capital and in 2012 took delivery of his £100m yacht, Vava 11. More recently he was named as a leading backer for Gerald Ronson’s new residential operation, Ronson Capital Partners. Bertarelli’s property assets and proceeds from Serono should take his family wealth to £9,370m.
4 £9,300m Henry Cheng Kar-Shun & family
Knight Dragon/New World Development
On September 20, Hong Kong property group Knight Dragon released the first 200 residential units at its Greenwich Peninsula scheme, SE10, with prices from £250,000 for a studio flat up to £1.7m for a 2,500 sq ft, three-bedroom waterfront penthouse with two balconies and a winter garden (completion is expected in early 2017). These are the first of 10,000 planned. Agent Felicity J Lord is marketing a similar three-bedroom penthouse in the Seren Park Gardens gated development, SE3, with a 40ft private roof terrace featuring a Jacuzzi and outside bar, for £1.3m. Knight Dragon has aspirations to see the 160-acre development transform into a bustling London district. Knight Dragon is run by Henry Cheng Kar-Shun, the son of Cheng Yu-Tung, one of Hong Kong’s great post war titans of commerce. He took over from his father as chairman of the family property company, New World Development, in 2012. It was in 2012 his investment vehicle Knight Dragon acquired 60% of the Greenwich Peninsula regeneration scheme from Quintain, the quoted property developer, in a £175m deal. Knight Dragon assumed full control of the Greenwich scheme in late 2013, paying a further £230m. The Cheng family already has some property interests in the UK, however, including The Knightsbridge, an upmarket residential scheme, and regeneration specialists Pinnacle. Though the family started out in jewellery, it later branched out into hotels and property. The family is now estimated to be worth £9,300m.
5 £9,000m David & Simon Reuben
Aldersgate
The billionaire Reuben brothers made a smart move in September when they disposed of their Travelodge portfolio for £500m, netting a near £100m profit. They own London Oxford airport plus a swathe of properties across Europe and the iconic 5 Hertford Street nightclub, W1, and the boutique chain Art’otel. They have just been given permission for a 350-room development in Hoxton. Last year they were given the green light by Westminster city council to turn Cambridge House, W1, into Britain’s most expensive single home. Better known as the former In and Out Club, SW1, the dilapidated Grade I listed property opposite Green Park will become a 48-room residence with an underground swimming pool, an 85 ft ballroom and a 35,000-bottle wine cellar. The Reubens bought the property, which was part of property entrepreneur Simon Halabi’s Piccadilly estate, for £130m in 2011. The Reubens offered Westminster £5.5m for affordable housing rather than the £1.8m that they originally proposed to secure planning permission. When completed the property should be worth more than £200m, with a £214m price tag suggested. 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. Their most valuable asset now is the fast-growing data centre company, Global Switch, which is now valued at £5bn. The Reubens have also 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 Brothers, are now valued at more than £8.78bn. Other assets take the brothers to a conservative £9bn. They recently took a £600m dividend from Global Switch.
6 £8,740m Wang Jianlin
Dalian Wanda
Another 200 homes went on sale in London’s Nine Elms regeneration area recently as China’s biggest property company, Dalian Wanda, launched its £700m residential scheme. Dalian Wanda, which is led by billionaire Wang Jianlin, bought the Market Towers site at Vauxhall last year from Irish developer Green Property, marking its first property deal outside of China. The scheme, called One Nine Elms, SW8, will see the existing 1970s towers replaced with two skyscrapers reaching 45 and 60 storeys, which – if completed today – would make it the tallest residential tower in London. The first 200 flats went on sale to UK buyers, with prices starting at £795,000 for a one-bed flat. Dalian Wanda signed up to Boris Johnson’s concordat, pledging to market homes in the UK before they are advertised overseas. The 1.13m sq ft project will have 436 flats overall as well as a five-star hotel in the second building known as the River Tower. Wang recently lost his spot as China’s richest man to Jack Ma, founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba. Yet poverty was all he knew in his youth. Wang spent his early years in the military during Mao’s cultural revolution. “In the early days we really had to scramble to eat,” he told the Financial Times in a rare interview last year. “The hardship then was unimaginable.” But he survived and has since developed good connections with the Chinese elite as a member of the Communist Party since 1976. It was only in 1992 that Wang started work for Dalian Wanda after leaving the army and working as an office administrator. To underline his commitment to Britain, he also bought the Sunseeker luxury yacht business in Poole for £320m at the same time as the Nine Elms deal was unveiled. It was Wang’s Victor Kiam moment. Like the famous American executive who bought the razor company as he liked its products, Wang has his own £21m Sunseeker boat in Shanghai and claims that he is the first Chinese citizen to own a private jet. Dalian Wanda also owns 9.03m m² of investment property, 49 Wanda Plazas, 26 luxury hotels, 86 cinemas, 40 department stores, and 45 karaoke centres around China. The company became the world’s largest theatre owner in 2012 when it acquired AMC Theatres. Wang, who chairs Dalian Wanda (as well as owning a 61% stake), said that the group wanted to bring “branded Chinese luxury to the global market where it has been long absent”, and added: “The London property market has excellent investment opportunities and we have confidence that Wanda’s strength and expertise will make the Wanda London’s premier hotel, further promoting development in the area.” Wang Jianlin’s wealth is reckoned to be around £8,740m, a good score but as with the Chinese rich list, it pushes him down the Estates Gazette list from number one last year.
7 £8,400m The Duke of Westminster
Grosvenor
Worried that the UK residential market is overheating, Grosvenor Group disposed of £240m of prime central London properties in April and warned that the threat of rising interest rates will affect market confidence. The Duke of Westminster’s property operation, is also in talks with several investors to create a £447m property investment club that will fund four to six high-end developments in Hong Kong, China and Japan. Grosvenor reported a pre-tax profits rise from £368m to £507m in 2013, with its net assets rising from £3.1bn to £3.455bn. Gerald Grosvenor, the sixth duke, stood down as chairman of the board in 2007 after 33 years in the role, although he has remained chairman of the trustees. Grosvenor has been managing land in the capital since 1677 and owns 300 acres of Belgravia and Mayfair and much of Oxford Street. The group almost doubled its development pipeline from £3.4bn to £6bn in 2013. The lion’s share of the firm’s work – around 86% – is in the UK, although the firm also has schemes in Ireland, the Americas and in Asia Pacific. Grosvenor is also working on an internal fund to invest in property equities. The long-short fund will begin by investing the company’s own money in listed real estate, but could open up to outside investors in the future. All of the Grosvenor Group shares are owned by the trustees of various Grosvenor trusts set up for the benefit of the Grosvenor family. Westminster’s private assets and estates include nearly 165,000 acres of rural land, the Chester Grosvenor Hotel and the UK’s largest bull stud operation. With the current uncertainty over the property market, Westminster’s asset wealth should now be around £8,400m.
8 £5,450m Ananda Krishnan
Maxis
The London property market has proved a profitable area of investment for Ananda Krishnan, one of Asia’s top tycoons. Krishnan was born in Kuala Lumpur. His father, a Malaysian civil servant, had Sri Lankan Tamil roots. Krishnan went to Melbourne University at 17 as the youngest ever Asian student. He graduated as a scholar in 1961 and in 1964 he graduated with an MBA from Harvard Business School. Krishnan entered the oil-trading business, and played a key role in setting up Malaysia’s state oil company Petronas in 1974. He became friends with former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad in the early 1970s in London. During Mahathir’s rule from 1981 to 2003, Krishnan won licences for telecommunications, satellite and broadcasting operations through his company Binariang. He also won a horse race betting monopoly and power concessions. In 1990, Ananda received Mahathir’s blessing to develop a horse-racing track into a town called the Kuala Lumpur City Center. With financing from Petronas, Krishnan tapped architect Cesar Pelli to design the development’s centrepiece, the 88-storey Petronas Twin Towers. The towers were the world’s tallest buildings from 1999 to 2004. His property foray into London also proved lucrative. Krishnan collected around $160m (£102m) from his investment in the ExCel London exhibition centre, E16, in 2008. Three years later he bought the 5.5-acre St John’s Wood barracks, NW8, site in London for $390m. Krishnan tore up the original plans for the site and in September 2014 submitted new plans to Westminster council for a luxury development of 163 flats with an end value believed to be more than £920m ($1.5bn). He has a number of stakes in public and private companies, the largest being a $4.3bn holding in Maxis, a major mobile phone operator. Other stakes in the country’s largest pay-TV company, an oil and gas provider and an Indian mobile phone company, plus a host of other assets take Krishnan to £5,450m.
9 £5,060m Nathan Kirsh
Kirsh Investments (UK)
Kirsh showed his generosity in September 2013 when he gave £10m to the London Business School, strengthening his links with the capital. It was in 2011 that Kirsh snapped up the landmark London skyscraper, Tower 42 (formerly the NatWest Tower), EC2, for £282.5m. The low-key Kirsh, a South African business magnate with a Swazi passport, plans more property purchases here. He has residency status both here and in America. Kirsh has a property empire spanning the UK, Australia and Swaziland. He sold a 30% stake in the British property company Minerva for £50m in 2011 and also owns a 75% stake in the Jetro cash and carry business in America, which is worth round £3,680m. On top of that Kirsh’s property assets (including Tower 42 and Abacus Property group) are worth around £850m. A leading benefactor to charities and in helping business start-ups, Kirsh is thought to be worth £5,060m.
10 £4,200m Earl Cadogan & family
Cadogan
In July the Cadogan Group purchased a residential portfolio of almost 200 properties, paying £47m for the Thurloe & Gunter estates in South Kensington and Earls Court. One the biggest beneficiaries of the boom in London house prices has been Earl Cadogan, now life president of the group that bears his family name. The Cadogan Group is in fine fettle and its 93 acres in Chelsea are among the premier property hot spots in the world. In 2013 the group celebrated the 300th anniversary of the purchase of the estate by Sir Hans Sloane, the antiquarian, physician, scientist and whose collection founded the British Museum, WC1. His eldest daughter Elizabeth married Charles, second Baron of Cadogan, and the younger brother of the first Earl Cadogan. In 2013 the net assets at Cadogan Group rose from £3.3bn to £3.9bn, while pre-tax profits surged from £57.3m to £73.8m on a £128m turnover. The present Earl began his career at merchant banker Schroder Wagg and took on the management of 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. His son and heir Edward – Viscount Chelsea chairs the group. Past dividends (including £30m in 2013 and £34m in 2012), quoted investments held by the separate Cadogan Settled Estates, personal property and estates should take the Cadogan family to £4.2bn.
11 £4,060m Kjeld Kristiansen & family
Kirkbi/Lego
The Kristiansen family – best known for the Lego toy brand – has been busy in the London property market. In May Kirkbi, the family investment vehicle, paid £55m for 1 Plough Place, EC4. That building adjoins Kirkbi’s New Fetter Place development. Kjeld Kristiansen, the main Lego shareholder, hails from Billund, Denmark. His father worked with his grandfather in the family business Lego. As a child, Kjeld often inspired and tested new model concepts and their building instructions. He also appeared on many of the company’s packages and marketing materials. In 1979, he became president and chief executive of The Lego Group. In 2004, he stepped down as president and chief executive to focus on his role as owner of the Lego Group and vice-chairman of the board, while maintaining his role as chairman of the board of Kirkbi. His family owns 75% of Lego via Kirkbi. Lego produced more than 55bn toy bricks in 2013 and had revenue of $4.5bn (£2.9bn). Kirkbi also owns 30% of Merlin Entertainments Group, a theme park operator that manages five Legoland parks. His family wealth is put at £4,060m.
12 £3,015m Anand Burman
Dabur
Elephant London is the name of a Burman property operation which is building property in London and Edinburgh, including an upmarket development in the up-and-coming Battersea area. But the family is best known in India for Dabur, its leading consumer goods company. It was founded in 1884 by Dr SK Burman, a physician in West Bengal, to produce and dispense Ayurvedic medicines. The family owns two thirds of the company which reported $152m of earnings on $1.2bn sales last year. With the Indian consumer market performing strongly, the shares are up by a third over the last year. Dabur has a portfolio of 400 products including honey, hair oil and fruit juices. Other family stakes in insurance, property (including a Delhi tech park) and sports take Burman and his family to £3,015m.
13 £2,750m Eddie & Sol Zakay
Topland
The Zakays’ Topland Group recently signed a joint venture with London Green, a planning gain specialist developer. Topland has committed £200m to fund residential development opportunities coming out of the joint venture. The Zakays are also showing growing interest in hotels: in 2013 they bought the Menzies hotel chain out of administration in an £85m deal. The aim is to create a multimillion pound hotel empire, which presently extends to 21 hotels including Bath’s prestigious Royal Crescent. The brothers, Eddie and Sol, launched their business during the property boom in the ’80s. Under Sol’s leadership the business has diversified into hotels, property lending, joint ventures, natural resources, solar energy, and venture capital in addition to property investment. Topland invested close to £400m in property alone in 2013, paying cash. Its portfolio is reckoned to be worth £4bn worldwide. We can see £485m of net assets in the 2012-13 accounts of 70 Zakay companies. But after stripping out borrowings, the Zakay family should be worth £2.75bn.
14= £2,600m Guo Guangchang
Fosun International
Fosun International, China’s largest privately owned company, has ambitions to establish an overseas commercial real estate portfolio centred around the two major world centres of capital on either side of the Atlantic – London and New York. The first part of the London element came last year when Fosun was part of a consortium that paid £64.5m for Lloyds Chambers, E1, a City of London office block. Fosun is run by Guangchang, its Shanghai-based chairman and largest investor. Raised in a farming community 190 miles south of Shanghai, he won a place at Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University, studying philosophy. After graduating, he worked for three years with the school’s Communist Youth League, in part doing research, before answering a call by former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1992 for entrepreneurially minded Chinese to join the capitalist world and start businesses. Teaming up with a group of Fudan students, he launched Fosun with seed capital of 38,000 yuan (£4,000) to manufacture diagnostic kits for hepatitis. The venture ultimately made 100m yuan in profit, Guo told Bloomberg. It was the start of a fruitful career as an entrepreneur and investor which has led Guo to be dubbed “China’s Warren Buffet”. Recently he has been doing deals overseas, paying $1.4bn (£0.9bn) for Portuguese insurance firm Caixa Seguros e Saude and agreeing to invest in Studio 8, a US-based film studio. The bulk of Fosun’s operations are on the mainland, where it has thrived in sectors including health care and travel. The property play should help push up Guo’s £2,600m fortune sharply.
14= £2,600m Ian & Richard Livingstone
London & Regional Group Holdings
The Livingstone brothers are making serious investments in the Dublin property market. Their London & Regional property operation already owns the Four Seasons hotel in Dublin, and is planning a major office development close to the capital’s Silicon Docks after paying €12m (£9.5m) for an ageing office building. The group bought 1 Clanwilliam Court, which adjoins another block it bought a year ago for €10m. London & Regional is expected to jointly develop the two properties into a modern six-storey block with about 100,000 sq ft of office space. London & Regional is also expected to submit plans shortly for the redevelopment of Nationwide House, the former headquarters of Irish Nationwide. The property group bought the building, on a 1.7-acre site, for €13m in January. London & Regional, one of the biggest property groups in Europe, is one of several bidders vying to buy the Moran & Bewley’s hotel group, which could sell for more than €450m. Its existing Irish investments include an Eircom networks building at Citywest in Dublin, bought for €21m in 2010. The low-profile brothers, who have more than 3,000 hotel rooms in London, are perhaps best known for owning Cliveden, the stately home-turned luxury hotel made famous by the Profumo scandal in the early 1960s and Chewton Glen. 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, SE10, and the former M&S headquarters in Baker Street, NW1. They have 3.5m sq ft of property developments in the pipeline in London and are also working on a huge £6bn development in Panama. While we can see sharply higher net assets of £1,042m in the 2013 accounts (up from £776m) of London & Regional Group Holdings, 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 £2,600m.
14= £2,600m Frank Lowy & family
Westfield
Australian billionaire Frank Lowy’s controversial plan to split Westfield Retail Trust’s shopping mall business won approval from the majority of his shareholders in June after a bruising battle. Under the plan, Lowy was seeking to split the company’s shopping mall empire into two separate entities – a domestic business focusing on shopping malls in Australia and New Zealand and an international business including shopping centres in the US and the UK. More than 76% of shareholders in Westfield Retail Trust voted in favour of the proposal, as it needed at least a 75% vote to go ahead. The UK assets include the £1.6bn Westfield centre in Shepherd’s Bush, which opened in 2008. In May Boris Johnson approved plans to extend the Shepherd’s Bush site and build more than 1,300 homes. The £1bn scheme north of the existing centre will be anchored by a four-level John Lewis department store. Main construction starts in 2015 with an expected opening in Christmas 2017. Its sister site is Westfield Stratford City, E20. Westfield, the Australian developer has an interest in another eight centres around Britain. It is the brainchild of co-founder Lowy, who hails from Slovakia and made his way to France after the war, later heading to Palestine where he joined the underground Israeli army, the Haganah and then the Golani Brigade, fighting during the Arab-Israeli War in the Galilee and Gaza. He left Israel in 1952 to settle in Australia. With then partner John Saunders, he created the Westfield Development Corporation through the development of a shopping centre at Blacktown in Sydney’s western suburbs. Over the next 30 years, Lowy and Saunders developed centres across Australia and the United States; changing the company name to the Westfield Group and listing the company on the Australian Stock Exchange in 1960. Saunders sold his interests and left the company in 1987. Lowy is now non-executive chairman of the group and worth around £2,600m.
17 £2,580m Baroness Howard de Walden & family
Howard de Walden Estates
Howard de Walden Estates saw its profits hit a record £45.1m on £84.7m turnover in 2012-13. The company, which controls 90 acres of central London on behalf of the Howard de Walden family, saw its net assets rise smartly to £2.333bn. The estate leases out and manages more than 850 buildings in the Marylebone area. 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. In the last 18 years, the family has clocked up over £330m dividends from the company and a separate development company Welbeck Land. With central London values holding up well, we value the business assets of the family at £2.35bn and we add another £230m for past dividends and other property assets to the Howard de Walden family after tax.
18 £2,500m Christo Wiese
Moorgarth
South African retail mogul Christo Wiese drafted in a senior ex-Sainsbury executive in October to look for acquisitions or set up a clothing chain in the UK. Wiese looked at the possibility of buying Sir Philip Green’s BHS last year. Moorgarth is Wiese’s vehicle to invest in the UK property market. Moorgarth’s property portfolio is worth more than £76m and is made up of shopping centres, offices and industrial properties. Wiese, now South Africa’s third richest person, is focusing on the UK market after his offshore investment company, Tradehold, sold its remaining retail investments in 2012. In early 2013 Moorgarth bought a Glaswegian mall and at the end of the year it spent £23m on the 400,000 sq ft Market Place shopping centre in Bolton. Soon after Moorgarth submitted a planning application for a £15m redevelopment of the centre. Wiese is the chairman and the largest single shareholder of Africa’s biggest retailer, low-priced supermarket chain Shoprite. He also owns a large stake in discount clothes, shoes and textiles chain Pepkor, where he is executive chairman. Wiese has significant stakes in seven publicly traded companies, and those stakes have pushed his wealth to £2,500m.
19 £2,300m Mark Pears & family
William Pears Family Holdings
The Pears family has recently been reorganising its assets. One company called Shelfco 152 paid out a £939.6m dividend in 2012-13 to a new parent, the William Pears Group, controlled by a family trust based in London. With the banks still restricted in their lending, the Pears family is stepping into the breach. The three brothers, led by Mark, have invested in Capital A Finance which aims to lend £250m to property investors. Capital A Finance recently put £25m into Ronson Capital Partners, a new investment vehicle created by property veteran Gerald Ronson (qv). The family property empire was started in 1952 by their grandfather, Bernard, with three north London greengrocers. The Hampstead-based business 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. Aside from Shelfco 152, we can see a further 31 separate companies in the Pears empire which showed £381m net assets in 2012-13. The value of the total Pears portfolio has been put at £6bn. They also own Telereal Trillium, the property manager which has 8.000 properties and houses around 1% of Britain’s workforce. Allowing for any borrowings, past dividends/salaries (£9m in 2010-11) and successful investments such as the $100m (£64m) the Pears made from the flotation of Facebook, we value the family at £2,300m.
20 £2,290m Vivien Chen & family
Nan Fung
One of Hong Kong’s biggest developers, Nan Fung, agreed to buy an 11-storey tower in London’s Canary Wharf district in October. The purchase price for 50 Bank Street, E14, the London HQ of the US financial services giant Northern Trust, was £153.5m. Nan Fung’s founder Chen Din-hwa died in 2012. He arrived in Hong Kong from Shanghai in 1949, setting up a textile company that grew into the major property developer and shipping business. His younger daughter Vivien has been running the company since 2009 and is now chairman. The family is embroiled in legal disputes over ownership of the business, but is reckoned to be worth £2,290m.
21 £2,000m John Whittaker & family
Peel Holdings
Planners approved Whittaker’s redevelopment of the Wirral College campus and a further 500 acres on his Liverpool Docklands development scheme this year. The £5.5bn regeneration scheme for Liverpool, called Liverpool Waters – was given the green light last year. Over the next 30 years Liverpool Waters is expected to create more than 20,000 jobs, deliver 9,000 houses and 3m sq ft of commercial development. Whittaker’s assets cover shopping centres, ports, airports, enormous land holdings, the Pinewood Shepperton Studios as well as Salford’s MediaCityUK, now home to large parts of the BBC. The low-key Whittaker went into the quarrying business before moving into property. In the 1980s, he fought a long, drawn-out battle to take over the Manchester Ship Canal Company out of which the Trafford Centre emerged. The centre is now part of the quoted Intu Properties after Whittaker agreed a takeover in 2011 which saw his Peel business emerge as a large Intu shareholder with a stake now worth £900m. Whittaker, renowned for his dogged determination in any planning or takeover battle, has 75% of his Peel Holdings business, which is worth in his view between £2.5bn and £3bn. With the strong property rebound, we go for a £3bn valuation, putting his stake at £1.9bn. Most of his wealth is in his assets and add £100m for dividends.
22 £1,988m Mangal Lodha & family
Lodha Group
Indian property magnate Mangal Prabhat Lodha’s Lodha Group made its mark in London in 2013 with the $645m (£413m) purchase of the former Canadian High Commission building in Mayfair, W1, and has since then bought a second central London property for £90m. But its latest plans dwarf these two forays. In September Lodha launched a drive to become one of the biggest investors in the London residential property market with plans to spend as much as $5bn by the end of 2018. Some $4bn will be spent on acquiring assets with a further $2bn on construction in the super-prime to mid-market sectors. The aim is to use the cash flow from the Mumbai developments to finance the London spending spree. Lodha is India’s largest housing developer. Founded in 1980 by Mangal Lodha, the family-controlled operation earned $1.4bn in revenues in 2013-14, largely from the sales in Mumbai, its base. Its newest project is Palava, an 800-acre township in suburban Mumbai that will comprise 800 residential towers and has Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachhan as its ‘first citizen’. The Parkvis is an upcoming luxury residential development that will eventually consist of six high-rise towers, and be spread over 5m sq ft in downtown Mumbai. One of the buildings will be the city’s first Trump Tower. Work is also proceeding on its 117-storey World One luxury tower in Mumbai, billed as the world’s tallest residence. In all Magal Lodha and his family are valued at £1,988m.
23 £1,800m Sammy Lee Tak-yee & family
Langham Estate
Sammy Lee Tak-yee divides his time between London and Hong Kong. He snapped up the 16-acre Langham Estate in central London from the receivers for just £51m in 1993. The estate, between Soho and Mayfair, had been valued at £175m in 1989. His family also has substantial property assets in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Switzerland and more in London. He now has a £104m stake in the quoted London property group Shafetsbury. In late 2011 his son had to pay out nearly £100m in a divorce settlement in a case before the Hong Kong high court. That left him with around £420m according to local reports. We assume that the fortune is also part of his father’s fortune which stands at around £1,800m.
24£1,670m Mahdi Al-Tajir
Drift Properties
A £500m development called gWest is planned by Al-Tajir and his family near Gleneagles in Scotland, which hosted the 2014 Ryder Cup. Al-Tajir, a former ambassador for the United Arab Emirates in Britain has the resources to undertake such a development with metal trading, oil and gas interests, and a huge property portfolio held through Drift Properties, with £231m net assets in 2013. He is best known though as owner of Highland Spring. The Scottish mineral drink operation turned in a £2.1m profit on record sales of £98m in 2013. Al Tajir spends much of his time in Britain at his London home or his 24,000-acre Perthshire estate next to Gleneagles. We can see £325m of net assets in the 2013 accounts of five Al-Tajir companies. We put the Al-Tajir fortune at £1,670m.
25 £1,590m Viscount Portman & family
Portman Estates
The last execution at Tyburn – of a highwayman – was on November 3, 1783, and a plaque now marks the spot of the Tyburn Tree, the gallows used for multiple hangings. Today the area between London’s Paddington Station, W2, and Hyde Park, is being rebranded Tyburnia and it is tipped to become as fashionable as Notting Hill. This is good news for the area’s principle landowner, Portman, whose family owns the 110-acre Portman Estate. The estate has been busy in recent years refurbishing its properties and neighbourhoods in an effort to move upmarket in the manner of the adjacent Howard de Walden estate. 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 such as Portman Village, the name for two shopping streets in the heart of the estate. As well as the London estate, the Portman Estate owns overseas assets in Australia and America. Portman continues to develop his agricultural interests with the Portman Burtley Estate which consists of 2,000 acres of farmland and woodland in the Buckinghamshire countryside. It is home to a prize-winning organic herd of 200 pedigree South Devon cattle, complementing Portman’s 3,000-acre Herefordshire estate. In all the property assets should be up by around 15% this year in line with the other quality London landlords and the Portman assets are now worth around £1,590m.
26= £1,500m John Caudwell
Caudwell Properties
Caudwell was granted planning permission in January for his £250m Mayfair mega-mansion, built from two Grade II listed buildings, thanks to “exceptional circumstances”. He has the funds to do it despite being one of the biggest taxpayers in the UK. As the Inland Revenue’s best friend, he has handed over £253m in four years. A former engineering apprentice, later car dealer, Caudwell joined the fledgling mobile phone industry in 1987 and never looked back. He sold most of his Potteries-based Caudwell Group in 2006 for £1.46bn, netting £1.24bn. He made another £100m when the company, trading as Phones4U, was sold again in 2011. He had previously sold off his Singlepoint customer billing operation to Vodafone for £405m. Caudwell is also working on another Mayfair house that he bought for £80m in 2012 from the brother of the Sultan of Brunei and reckons that refurbishment will take around two years. Caudwell also has a £55m stake in Jon Moulton’s Better Capital private equity fund. His eight small property companies showed nearly £6m profit in 2012. With his proceeds and other assets we stick with a £1.5bn valuation for Caudwell. He does hefty charitable work for Caudwell Children, which grants holidays, provides equipment and support to youngsters with life-limiting illnesses and their families.
26= £1,500m Kuok Khoon Hong
Aviva Tower
Since 2011 Kuok Khoon Hong has owed half of the Aviva Tower, EC3, the City headquarters of the Aviva insurance giant. The building occupied by Aviva generates a net annual rental income equivalent to 5.42% of the £288m purchase price. Kuok Khoon Hong bought the tower with Martua Sitorus, his partner in Wilmar International, the world’s largest palm oil processor. But the Aviva purchase was a private investment by them separate from Wilmar, which they co-founded in 1991. Kuok Khoon Hong worked for Malaysian billionaire Robert Kuok (also his uncle) before starting Wilmar. In 2007 Wilmar merged with his uncle’s palm oil business and Kuok Khoon Hong chairs Wilmar today with a fortune of £1,500m.
26= £1,500m Teddy Sagi
Playtech/Camden Market
A major chunk of valuable real estate in and around London’s Camden market area, comprising the old Camden Stables portion of the markets, was sold to Israeli gaming and software entrepreneur Teddy Sagi for £400m in March 2014. The package also includes a major site beside the Regents Canal called Hawley Wharf, which has planning permission for a £300m redevelopment including 170 houses, a modernised market area, a new school and a repertory cinema. Sagi then spent £22m for the 0.3-acre Camden Market, NW1, on the high street in October and followed that with the £50m purchase of Camden Lock. The markets, which attract more than 100,000 visitors each weekend, are now under a single owner for the first time and Sagi is considering floating the business on the stock market. Sagi founded gaming software business Playtech in 1999. He floated it on the London stock market in 2006 and it is now worth £1.86m. He sold a 15% stake in Playtech in March 2014 just before the first Camden deal raising £326m. Sagi retains a 33% stake worth more than £600m and also owns TradeFX, which runs Markets.com, and SafeCharge, an online payments company. He has real estate in Tel Aviv, London and Berlin. His fortune is reckoned to be a conservative £1,500m.
26= £1,500m Poju & Anita Zabludowicz
Tamares Real Estate Investments
A recent exhibition at The Zabludowicz Collection was warmly received by art critics. Based in a former Methodist chapel in London’s edgy Kentish Town since 2007, the Collection promotes the works of emerging artists. It has been financed by Zabludowicz and his art-mad wife Anita. He has lived and worked in London for most of his life though his father Shlomo, a holocaust survivor, built the family business around Soltam, an Israeli defence contractor. The defence interests have now been off-loaded and the family diversified into property and hotels in Israel and Las Vegas. In 2011 the family company Tamares sold its British Israel Property operation for $700m. Tamares has a dozen prime properties round the world and a series of quoted and private investments. Zabludowicz recently sold a property called the Princess Arcade on Piccadilly for around £120m. Zabludowicz and his wife Anita are creating a £60m pair of “his” and “her” mansions with a gallery for their extensive art collection and one of the biggest basement developments dug in Britain. Though there is little evidence of asset wealth in their British companies, such as Tamares Real Estate Investments with just £215,000 net assets in 2012, we keep the Zabludowiczs at £1.5bn this year.
30 £1,310m Sir Anwar Pervez & family
Bestway
Sir Anwar Pervez’s Bestway cash and carry operation recently snapped up the Co-Op pharmacy business under the noses of Boots and Lloyds for £620m. Profits at West London-based Bestway (Holdings) hit a record £164.3m on £1.957bn sales in 2012-13, while the separate Bestway Northern added £20m profit and £561m sales. Pervez, Bestway’s founder, came to Britain at 21 from Pakistan and opened his first shop in 1962. He built a chain of 11 shops and then in 1976 he turned to cash and carry with his first depot in West London. Today Bestway Group trades from 62 warehouses under the Bestway and Batleys names and enjoys an 18% market share in the grocery wholesale sector. It offers over 5.5m sq ft of selling space, a product line of more than 25,000 items and serves 100,000 independent retailers. Bestway also has a property arm called Palmbest with a £500m portfolio including industrial estates, large warehouse units, office buildings located in prime locations, retail shops and residential property. Palmbest’s blue-chip tenants include McDonald’s, Vodafone, NatWest, Café Rouge, Sainsbury, Post Office, Argos and Lunn Poly. In the last few years, Palmbest has developed nearly 1.0m sq ft of commercial space comprising warehouse units in Leeds, Nottingham, Liverpool. Glasgow, Edinburgh, Peterborough, Leicester, Gillingham, Durham, Luton, Edmonton and Acton. The group also has planning permission to construct around 583 residential units (houses and flats) in Leicester and London. Palmbest properties are located throughout the country including central London locations. Its services include development and property maintenance. The two Bestway companies are easily worth together £2.5bn. The Pervez family owns just over half of Bestway and that stake is worth £1,280m. Other assets add around £30m. Pervez would be much richer if he did not give large amounts to charity every year. In 2011-12 some £2m was devoted to charitable causes mainly in the educational and medical fields. In all the Pervez family should be worth £1,310m.
31 £1,290m Benzion Freshwater & family
Daejan Holdings
Daejan Holdings, the low-key London property group, recently rented Africa House, WC2, to a firm of lawyers. This, combined with a rent increase on a hotel on the Strand nearby, has given the company an £8m boost to its annual rent roll, which helps explain why the company is one of the most highly regarded in the sector. Since 1992 it has grown its dividend by 230%, equivalent to a compound annual growth rate of 5%. Daejan is valued at £802m while Freshwater and his family have a £633m 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 £950m net assets between them in 2012 or 2013. But we cut the net assets attributable to the Freshwater family to £600m to allow for double counting and any charitable stakes. We add £57m for past dividends for the Freshwaters.
32 £1,200m Richard Desmond
Northern & Shell
Richard Desmond, who made a £433m profit on his sale of Channel 5 this year, is going into property development in a big way. The owner of the Express stable of papers wants to convert his 13.5-acre West Ferry Printers site in London’s Docklands into homes as his media empire moves from the capital to Luton. The former advertising salesman turned publisher will not regret the purchase of the Express titles in 2000 for a bargain basement £125m. In 2013 Express Newspapers turned in a handsome £30.4m profit on £204.8m sales and showed £365m net assets. Since his purchase, Desmond 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 the Express titles (which made up the bulk of his Northern & Shell’s £35m profit in 2013) are worth their net assets figure. Desmond has used his hefty salaries and the payments from sales of magazine in 1991 and more recently (around £80m) to build up a hefty property and investment portfolio. In all he should be worth £1,200m.
33 £1,180m Dermot Desmond
Titanic Quarter
Irish financier Dermot Desmond announced in September that he is building €200m (£160m) worth of residential housing in his native Ireland as he feels the downturn is at an end. Further north, he jointly owns the Titanic Quarter development in Belfast at the shipyard where the ill-fated liner was built on land provided by site owners Belfast Harbour Commissioners. Titanic Quarter, covering 185 acres, agreed a £66m refinancing package in July. Apart from the Titanic Belfast visitor centre, the development includes the Titanic Studios, where Game of Thrones is recorded, Belfast Metropolitan College, a science park, a financial services campus, a hotel and the Arc, a 480-unit apartment block. The centre attracted more than 800,000 visitors in its first year. Desmond also has property assets in London. A former stockbroker-turned investor, he is best known as the leading shareholder in Celtic, the Glasgow SPL club, where he has a £19m stake. His London City Airport operation and a stake in Greencore, an Irish foods company, were sold before prices slumped, netting Desmond £848m. He made £240m earlier from selling stakes in Esat 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 £61m of stakes in UK quoted companies including an £11m stake in Great Portland Estates. In all he is easily worth £1,180m.
34 £1,104m Chris Lazari & family
Lazari Investments
Lazari Investments is set to buy the Brunswick Centre, WC1, for £135m, reflecting a 3.6% yield. Lazari’s net assets hit £1,034m in 2013-14. The group’s property portfolio consists of nearly 2.5m sq feet of prime commercial space before the Brunswick deal in London’s West End and North London. Chairman Lazari said in the 2012-13 annual report that the group was in “impressive form.” Certainly the figures back this up: with the cash being generated the company has cut its borrowings sharply by more than £200m since 2008. Lazari came to Britain in the early 1970s, to work in the fashion business. In 1978, he diversified into property and has never looked back. The business is worth its net asset figure. Other assets take Lazari and his family to £1,104m.
35 £1,070m Jon Hunt
Bacchus Partners
With a commercial property portfolio that has grown in value by 20% plus to more than £560m, Hunt has clearly not lost his touch in the property world. The former owner of the Foxtons estate agency chain, Hunt sold up at the height of the boom for £375m in early 2007. There has been recent speculation in property circles that Hunt might be in the market to buy back Foxtons, which floated on the stock market in 2013. Its shares are currently well below the IPO price of 230p. Hunt has issued a resounding “no comment” on the speculation. Born to an army family, Hunt was awarded a scholarship to Millfield Boarding School. He left after O-levels to join the army, passing basic training for the Royal Artillery, where his father had been a colonel. After leaving the army, and following a short spell washing cars in Canada, Hunt returned to the UK in 1972 and spent the next eight years working as an estate agent in Surrey. His property career began at age 19 when he borrowed a £100 deposit to buy a one-bedroom conversion in Woking for £4,500. In 1981 Hunt, then aged 28, founded Foxtons, which took its name from a village near his Suffolk home. After the sale of Foxtons, Hunt made substantial commercial property investments in central London at the bottom of the market in 2008. As well as commercial property, Hunt has been active in residential development too in central London. He turned down an unsolicited offer for his seven-storey townhouse in Kensington Palace Gardens in 2008, reputedly for £200m. Hunt is now dipping his toe into new waters, a luxury serviced–office business called Dryland. His other assets including a car collection and a large Suffolk estate. In 2010 he launched Bacchus Partners, hoping to snap up derelict properties across the South East and east of England, to turn them into housing. Hunt is now worth £1,070m.
36 £1,060m Martua Sitorus
Aviva Tower
Aviva Tower, EC3, the City headquarters of the Aviva insurance giant, was bought in 2011 for £288m by two palm oil tycoons from Asia. The building generates a net annual rental income equivalent to 5.42% of the purchase price. The pair – Kuok Khoon Hong and Martua Sitorus – are the billionaire founders of the world’s largest palm oil processor Wilmar International, which is listed in Singapore. But the Aviva purchase was a private investment by them separate from Wilmar, which they co-founded in 1991. The group gets nearly half of its revenue in cooking oil sales from China through its Jin Long Yu, or Golden Dragon Fish, brand. Sitorus traded shrimp as a teenager and holds a degree in economics from an Indonesian University. Now Wilmar chairman, Sitorius has a stake in Wilmar and private assets worth in total around £1,060m.
37 £1,000m Simon Glick
Songbird
A low-key diamond and property tycoon from New York, Glick started out in his father’s diamond business. Louis Glick made his fortune as a trader setting up Louis Glick & Co, renowned for its expertise in rare yellow diamonds. Simon Glick later began to manage the family’s investments in property and financial companies. Glick was a friend of the late Paul Reichmann, the founder of Canary Wharf, who lost control of the business after the early 1990s economic slowdown. Glick backed his efforts to regain control in 1995 in an £820m deal. Canary Wharf thrived and floated on the stock market in the late 1990s. Reichmann lost control again in 2004 after a takeover battle that saw Glick back the Morgan Stanley consortium that took control of Canary Wharf through Songbird Estates. Songbird floated on the stock market in 2004 and its shares have soared recently on the back of a potential £1.6bn bid from Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, which has been rejected by the Songbird management as too low. Songbird is valued by the stock market at £2.3bn and the Glick Entities have a £600m stake. But in 2006, Glick sold £19m worth of shares in a placing and a year later it was reported that his family had received around £120m in Songbird dividends. In addition, he spent $64.4m (£41m) in 2005 buying a near 10% stake in Six Flags, the US amusement park group. Glick has also had stakes in banks and mortgage providers. The New York Times reported that a consortium he was part of was underbidder on a large Manhattan property deal with a $5.1bn bid. We value the family at £1,000m.
38= £950m Fred & Peter Done
FICM
Fred Done is moving into the private rented sector with plans for a 380-apartment scheme in central Salford. His company FICM has submitted proposals for two blocks around the Grade II listed Black Friar pub which will form part of the scheme and there will also be five town houses at the centre of the development. The Done brothers, Fred and Peter, started out as runners for their bookmaking father in Salford. From a single betting shop in 1967, the pair now own the Betfred operation, which took over the Tote in 2011 for £265m. The brothers also have interests ranging from legal services to insurance, sports promotion, property and a restaurant. We can see three main but separate Done companies, together making around £43m profit in 2012-13. The businesses are easily worth £850m. Past salaries/dividends and Fred’s £50m stake in Satellite Information Services, take the pair to £950m.
38= £950m Eddie Healey
Stadium (Holdings)
Eddie Healey sold his Parc Trostre retail park in Wales to M&G Real Estate for £156m in August. He knows all about retail development having built the hugely successful Meadowhall centre outside Sheffield. The £1.17bn sale of the Meadowhall Shopping Centre in 1999 netted him around £420m. Having reinvested some of the Meadowhall proceeds, we can see nearly £403m net assets in the 2013 accounts of SPH 2011, the main Healey family company. After Meadowhall, Eddie Healey developed Centro, Europe’s largest shopping centre built on 196 acres of an old steel work site on the Ruhr. A £550m refinancing of the 1.6m sq ft centre in 2012 followed the purchase of a 50% stake in 2011 by a Canadian pension plan for around £250m. Despite some losses at SPH 2011 totalling £76m in two years, the Parc Trostre deal should push the family to £950m.
38= £950m Lord Sugar
Amshold
BBC’s Apprentice star Lord Sugar put a £45m price tag on a Fitzrovia office block last month. In July he emerged as the buyer of a £23.3m building near the Old Street roundabout, regarded as the centre of a tech hub in London. Late last year he spent around £20m on three properties in the same area. Sugar, showing all the skill he demands of his apprentices, has generated higher returns in the buildings he has bought, with rents rising from £20 per sq ft to above £40 in recent lettings. He is also a canny seller and in May 2013, sold a Mayfair office block for almost £50m more than he bought it for just five years ago. Sugar’s main property operation, Amshold, saw its net assets soar to £448.9m in 2012-13. A Hackney tailor’s son, Sugar started his Amstrad consumer electronics operation in 1968. Following its £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 after chairing premiership club Spurs from 1991 to 2001, he picked up at least £25m for his stake. Sugar has at least £600m worth of property. With £150m of cash and other personal property assets, the rising Amshold net assets and the recent £50m property profit take Sugar to £950m.
41 £900m David Ross
Kandahar
On graduation from Nottingham University, David Ross joined Arthur Andersen and became a chartered accountant. He gave up his job as an accountant in 1989 to co-found the Carphone Warehouse with school friend Sir Charles Dunstone. It floated on the stock market in 2000 and demerged its TalkTalk telecoms and broadband operation in 2010. Carphone Warehouse has now merged with Dixons to form Dixons Carphone. Ross’s combined stake is now worth £571m. He had a £192m property portfolio held by his Kandahar Real Estate business, but large chunks were sold off in 2011 to pare down debts. His portfolio is now worth around £105m. But losses here are offset by private equity gains, hefty Carphone dividends and Ross is now be worth £900m.
42 £858m John Christodoulou
Octagon Assets
Cyprus-born property entrepreneur Christodoulou left the island for Britain after the 1974 Turkish invasion. Leaving school at 16, he trained as a diamond mounter and bought his first property in 1994. His London-based Yianis Holdings’ net assets rose to £278.3m in 2012-13. It is the second largest freeholder at Canary Wharf with 2m sq ft, including two luxury hotels. He also has around 2,000 increasingly valuable residential and commercial freehold units in central London. Other interests include Manchester’s Hilton Tower, the tallest residential hotel building in Europe. Christodoulou also has overseas business assets valued at more than £580m. Personal assets take him to £858m.
43= £850m Earl of Iveagh & Guinness family
Burhill Estates
Iveagh’s 22,500-acre Elveden Estate on the border with Norfolk and Suffolk recently became a LEAF farm (Linking Environment and Farming). It was 120 years ago that the Iveagh family used some of the profits from Guinness to buy the estate. In 1886 the family started what is now the oldest family office in Britain to protect its wealth. The £200m operation was sold in May. 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. Iveagh inherited the title and around £62m in Guinness shares in 1992. He is not listed on the share register of Diageo, the drinks giant which owns Guinness, but we assume the wider family stake in Diageo may be worth £200m. The family has £40m of net assets in two companies, Elveden Farms and the Burhill Estates Company. In Canada, the family’s British Pacific Properties still owns around 2,400 acres, valued at around £30m in 1992. Now the remaining stake should be worth perhaps £400m with another £100m for past sales. Other assets should keep the Guinness family at £850m.
43= £850m Jim Mellon
Regent Pacific
Investments in biotechnology companies such as Plethora Solutions, have proved a fertile investment field for Mellon. He is also a big investor in German property where he has around 70% of his wealth. A former Hong Kong fund manager, Mellon has made his money from investments including a £55m return on an investment firm called Charlemagne Capital in 2006. A year later he made around £25m from a £10,000 investment in a uranium mine. Isle of Man-based Mellon is one of island’s biggest property owners. He has two homes there, four other homes round Europe and several properties in Ibiza. We can see more than £16m of holdings in London-quoted companies and a £12m stake in Regent Pacific, his Hong Kong quoted investment operation held by Mellon. In all he is now worth £850m.
45 £810m Ni Zhaoxing
ZhongRong
Ambitious plans to build a £500m replica of the Crystal Palace 78 years after it was burned down are being negotiated between Chinese real estate developer Zhongrong group and Bromley council, which owns the site. The project was unveiled in October 2013 by Ni Zhaoxing, the ZhongRong founder, with London mayor Boris Johnson. Ni revealed that modern materials instead of cast iron and plate glass would be used to construct the “transparent” high building. It would be a piece of “artwork” and a “jewel in the crown for Britain and the world”. The palace is intended to compete with such established exhibitions as the British Museum, WC1, and the Grand Palais in Paris, drawing up to 2m visitors a year. It would be built on the same site in south east London which bears its name and to which the original was moved from Hyde Park in 1854. Ni proudly boasts his development company has built 78 “European-style palace” buildings in Beijing and Crystal Palace would be his 79th, even though it has run into local opposition from the Crystal Palace Residents’ Association. Ni invested in Shanghai real estate more than a decade ago, and has reaped profits from its boom, through projects such as Zhongrong Jasper Tower in the Lujiazui financial district. His wealth is now around £810m.
46= £800m Richard Caring
Camden Market Estate Holdings
Richard Caring was part of a consortium that sold London’s fashionable Camden Stables market in March for £400m. Caring should have made £100m from the deal. In September he sold the Wentworth Golf Club for £135m to Chinese conglomerate Reignwood Investments. In June 2013 he was part of a consortium that sold a Grosvenor Square building for more than £250m. A fashion tycoon originally, Caring owns International Clothing Designs (Holdings), a London-based operation, which made just £89,000 profit in 2012-13. But restaurants are where Caring is making his mark though he is happy to sell restaurant assets if the price is right. The recent £100m sale of the Côte Brasserie chain followed the £83m profit Caring made from the 2007 sales of the Bierodrome and Strada restaurant chains and more recently from the Soho House operation. His upmarket restaurants and clubs in London are doing well: Caprice Holdings, which has The Ivy and Le Caprice among its stable, made a profit of £4.2m on £44.6m sales in 2012. His £90m purchase of the upmarket Annabel’s nightclub in 2007 was a shrewd move too. Annabel’s and its related operations made a combined £4.5m profit in 2012. Caring is expected to invest his sale proceeds in restaurants. We raise him to £800m allowing for debt.
46= £800m Sir Roger De Haan & Peter De Haan
Saga Leisure
Former Saga boss Roger De Haan was knighted in the 2014 New Year’s Honours List for being a “hugely generous and active philanthropist”. His local town Folkestone has been the recipient of his largesse in recent years. This year his charitable trust spent £1m on helping to build a new park for the town in time for the recent Folkestone Triennial public arts festival that De Haan started in 2008. The De Haan family money comes from the Saga holiday operation, which started as a local hotel run by his father. De Haan took over the running of the company in 1984 and sold up in a £1.35bn deal in 2004. After stripping out any debt and tax he should have netted at least £850m. His brother, Peter, had been finance director but now runs his own wine business and has a property company, Opus Trust, which showed £27.8m net assets in 2012-13. In addition Roger bought Peter out of some of his shares in an earlier £81m deal. Folkestone Harbour Holdings, which Sir Roger owns, saw its 2013 profits soar from £989,000 to £11.4m. We reckon the De Haan family should still be worth £800m allowing for the commitment to Folkestone.
48 £775m Nicholas Roditi
Plantation & General Investments
Workspace Group, the London real estate investment trust, recently sold a portfolio of 10 industrial sites for £44.3m, at a premium of 35% to the March 2014 valuation, Shortly after Workspace sold the first phase of its mixed-use development at Poplar Business Park, E14, to Telford Homes in a deal worth £16.3m. Nicholas Roditi, a former fund manager and now very low key investor, is a leading shareholder in Workspace with a family stake now worth £261m. Roditi once worked closely with billionaire financier George Soros. The magic must have rubbed off as Roditi has large stakes in a number of fast-growing quoted companies, including a £35m stake in the recently floated AO World. While his most lucrative investment must be Ocado, Roditi’s total holdings in five quoted companies are now worth £491m. In 2007 a Russian business paper outed Roditi as the owner of a 1.5% stake in Russian energy giant Unified Energy Systems, with a £600m stake. Roditi also has holdings totalling £100m in two private companies, PGI and Belvedere Realty Investments. The American magazine, Financial World, reported that Roditi earned £50m in 1995 and £80m in 1996. In all, with past Russian investments, Roditi should be worth £775m allowing for reinvestment.
49= £750m Peter Green & family
Luscar
Serious money has been made in recent London luxury hotel investments such as the Maybourne Group and the Savoy by the Green family. The son of a Manchester draper and grocery retailer, Green married Canadian industrial heiress Mary-Jean Mitchel in the mid-1970s. She died of cancer in 1990 leaving Green running the family business with their two sons. In 1996, much of the family’s huge Canadian mining operations were sold in a £300m deal. The Green family reinvested 10% of their proceeds in the business, which was taken over again in 2001, netting the Green family another £50m. The Green family also made a £60m profit from the sale of an energy company in 1996. But the family properties in Bermuda, London and the profits from his London deals take the family to £750m.
49= £750m David Sullivan
Conegate
Conegate, the property vehicle of publisher and West Ham United co-owner David Sullivan, made £14.7m profit on £23.4m turnover in 2013 when its net assets came in at £119m. Sullivan also recently sold a supermarket for £82m and completed a £100m development with £60m profit in St James. But Essex-based Sullivan will be delighted with the way the Hammers returned to top flight football for 2012-13 after just a year away. Sullivan and business partner David Gold bought into West Ham in 2010 and now have an 86% stake (Sullivan has 51%). The pair had just sold Birmingham City, where after 16 years Sullivan made £20m from selling his stake. Roldvale, his main company, made a £609,000 profit in 2013. Sullivan’s dividends and salaries there in recent years total nearly £60m. Asset sales such as the £50m from Sports Newspapers in 2007, a £100m pension pot and his property empire underpin Sullivan’s wealth, now £750m.
51 £740m Prince Charles
Duchy of Cornwall
The Duchy of Cornwall, created by royal charter in 1337 by Edward III, delivers its annual income to Prince Charles in his capacity as Duke of Cornwall but he cannot profit from the sale of capital assets. In 2013-14, the 130,000-acre estate produced a record surplus of £19.5m thanks to income generated by a new anaerobic digestion and biomethane injection plant at Poundbury, which was opened by Prince Charles in November 2012. Rising agricultural land and property prices helped push the net assets up sharply to nearly £835m. We value the Duchy on its net asset figure, and Prince Charles in his capacity as steward of those assets at £860m with personal assets added. Aside from his work as heir to the throne, Prince Charles is also one of Britain’s most innovative property developers. Poundbury, outside Dorchester, was built on Duchy of Cornwall land and tested his ideas about architecture, the environment and town planning. The Duchy joined forces with a Dorset farming partnership to build and run the Poundbury anaerobic plant. Renewable electricity is now being generated and exported to the grid, and biomethane is injected in to the local gas distribution network, the first commercial scale operation in the country. Poundbury, 20 years old in 2013, is also being extended and by 2025 will house more than 5,000 people and create 2,000 jobs.
52 £725m Peter Jones & family
Emerson Developments
Cheshire-based Emerson Developments turned in sharply higher profits of £33.7m on a £187m turnover in 2013-14. The 33% rise was fuelled by all of its divisions performing well. The company is also “in a good position to perform strongly in the coming years” writes chairman Peter Jones in the annual report. As founder Jones started in housebuilding locally in 1959 and was later one of the first developers to spot the development potential of south Manchester, buying up tracts of land cheaply. He has taken his development work overseas to Portugal and Florida. Emerson is worth its £655m net assets. Jones’ other company, PE Jones (Properties), had £46m of net assets. Jones and family trusts own them both. We value the businesses at £700m, adding £25m for other assets and property.
53 £680m Mark Dixon
Regus Group
Regus, the world’s largest provider of flexible workspaces, is continuing an expansion programme, with 450 new centres planned by the end of 2014. It will then have a 2,260-strong portfolio. Regus, based in Luxembourg, was started in 1989 by Dixon, a former sandwich and later hamburger salesman, with the sale proceeds of earlier businesses. It floated on the stock market in 2000. After hasty over-expansion, the shares collapsed. Dixon nursed the business back to health and it is now valued at £1.63bn. In the six months to June 2014 revenues increased 16.9% to £804m while profit rose 41% to £40m. Dixon’s stake is worth nearly £560m. Share sales and other assets take Dixon to £680m.
54 £660m The Duke of Bedford
Woburn Enterprises
A new £200m Center Parcs holiday village on Bedford’s Woburn estate opened in July which will please Harrow and Harvard-educated Bedford. Well versed in the hospitality trade, he runs the 13,000 Woburn Abbey estate and house. He has various and successful business ventures under his control at Woburn, which were set up by his grandfather to pay a £4.5m bill for death duties. His late father left just £39.1m in his will. We can see just £11.8m net assets in the 2013 accounts of three family companies, including Woburn Enterprises. But two companies, Bedford Estate Nominees and London Estate Nominees, show that there is more to the Bedford wealth if it is not entirely evident. The magnificent Woburn House, and grounds must easily be worth £150m. The art treasures inside, including 24 Canalettos, and a recently identified Rembrandt should be worth £450m, but we halve that to £225m to allow for any tax in the event of a sale. Estates Gazette put a £200m price tag on Bedford’s London estate consisting of 180 buildings in Bloomsbury. With land and art prices rising we raise Bedford to £660m.
55= £650m Sir Donald Gordon & family
Intu Properties
Having started a life assurance operation in South Africa, Gordon sold up in 1999 and focused on British property. His family now has stakes worth £514m in two quoted property companies, Intu Properties and Capital & Counties Properties. South African share sales and other assets we believe add around £150m to the Gordon family. Hefty charitable donations such £10m to the Royal Opera House and a further £10m to the Wales Millennium Centre clip the Gordon family back to £650m.
55= £650m Paul Sykes
Highstone Group
Paul Sykes underwrote UKIP’s campaign against Britain’s continued membership of the European Union in May’s European elections to the tune of £1m. Sykes, who founded and later developed Sheffield’s Meadowhall Centre with Eddie Healey, has now moved away from business. He is involved in protecting rainforests from destruction and preserving the environment in his native Yorkshire. Investments in the old Commonwealth countries, personal sale proceeds from Meadowhall and Highstone property group showing £253.7m net assets in 2012-13 take Sykes to £650m.
57 £615m Sameer Gehlaut
Indiabulls
Sameer Gehlaut is a leading Indian property developer. In June he bought 22 Hanover Square, W1, for £155m. The building’s location in prime Mayfair adjoining Bond Street is truly exceptional and Hanover Square will become arguably London’s best-connected square when the new Bond Street Crossrail station opens in 2018. “The building has huge potential for redevelopment,” Gehlaut said. He graduated in 1994 with a degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology. He worked in US-based oil services company Halliburton before co-founding Indiabulls Financial Services – India’s first online brokerage company – in 1997. Under his leadership the group has diversified into core economy sectors of financial services. Real Estate and Power has a combined net worth of $3.17bn (£2bn). Indiabulls Group was backed by steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal from the start. Gehlaut’s wealth is put at £615m.
58 £610m Steve Morgan
Redrow
Steve Morgan started Redrow 40 years ago and floated it on the stock market in 1994. He sold £240m worth of shares in the float and afterwards when he left the board in 2000. He returned in 2009 and now has a £432m stake in the £1bn operation. Morgan also chairs Wolves, the League One football club. He made £97m stake from the 2006 takeover of the De Vere leisure group. Flintshire-based Redrow is one of the UK’s leading residential and mixed-use property developers. It has a reputation for imaginative design, build quality and customer service, with the skills needed to complete a wide range of developments – from large greenfield sites to complex brownfield regeneration schemes. With other assets Morgan is worth £610m after tax.
59= £600m Michael Tabor
Horse Racing Enterprises
A gaming and horseracing millionaire, Tabor recently sold the Manhattan skyscraper he acquired in 2007 with a private equity company. A $575m (£368m) price was agreed for 450 Park Avenue which had been bought for $509m. Monaco-based Tabor is the former owner of the UK-based Arthur Prince bookmakers’ chain until he sold it in 1995 for £28m. He has a £25m Barbados house, a third of the island’s Sandy Lane Hotel and a stake in Victor Chandler’s Gibraltar internet gaming operation. Other deals include £16m made from a fitness club chain sold in 2006, while Tabor has an £18m stake in pubs group Mitchells and Butler. His fortune grew through playing the world’s currency markets and investment in horseflesh. Tabor’s horse, Thunder Gulch, won the Kentucky Derby and other top US races in 1995, while he has a stake in the first foal sired by super-horse Frankel. His investment in Global Radio is coming good, making a £69.2m profit in 2012-13. We raise Tabor to £600m.
59= £600m Peter Wood
Royalton
Best known as the man who started the telephone insurer Direct Line in 2005. Peter Wood has branched out into a new career in property. Last year he took a 50% stake in Royalton, a specialist developer which puts its “opulent and beautiful” homes in the same league as Fabergé eggs. It has created homes for wealthy private clients in Wentworth and Esher in Surrey. In April the company bought 35 Marylebone High Street, W1, the former home of BBC London, for £75m from Scottish Widows Investment Partnership and plans to turn it into exclusive townhouses and apartments. Royalton is also expanding into residential developments in wealthy enclaves in the United States. It is also looking for “trophy sites” in New York and the Beacon Hill district of Boston. When he made his Royalton investment, Wood said . “We have more than $1bn (£0.6bn) of gross development planned over the next three years” in the US and UK. After Direct Line, he founded a further six insurance companies including esure in 2000, which floated on the London stock exchange in 2013. Wood has a £311m stake in esure and sold £198m worth of shares in the float. He made more than £50m from Direct Line and invested tens of millions of dollars in the US insurer Plymouth Rock. With a small stake in model maker Hornby (worth £2m) and an extensive personal property portfolio, Wood should easily be worth £600m.
61 £580m Freddie Linnett & the Murphy family
Charles Street Buildings (Leicester)
Leicester-based Charles Street Buildings Group recently secured the largest city centre office letting in Nottingham for four years to Parexel, the pharma giant, with a 15-year lease, a 10-year break clause and a rent of £9.30 per sq ft for a 62,000 sq ft building. Charles Street Buildings (Leicester) is on a roll with profits rising in 2013 to £36.7m on £38.2m sales. The business was started by her late uncles who came to Britain from Ireland after the war. Linnett inherited their stakes. It is worth its £574m net assets. Other assets take Linnett and the Murphy family to £580m after tax.
62= £550m Lloyd Dorfman
Esselco Properties
The childhood London home of celebrated English author Daphne du Maurier, was put up for sale by Lloyd Dorfman in October with a £32m price tag. Built in 1730, the Grade II listed Cannon Hall is a three-storey, six-bedroom property. Dorfman, who sold his Travelex foreign exchange group in May to a Gulf-based entrepreneur for £1bn, had a 34.5% stake in the business. A reluctant merchant banker, Dorfman started Travelex in 1976, armed with a £25,000 loan from a friend and a central London office. In 2006 Travelex was partially taken over by venture capital group Apax Partners in a £1.06bn deal and Dorfman netted £240m for selling part of his stake. He has now exited and is involved in new ventures. In June it was announced that Doddle, a £24m click and collect joint venture between Dorfman and Network Rail, plans to open 300 outlets in train stations over the next three years. He has also diversified into property and his Esselco Properties turned in a near £5m profit in 2013 (against £3.3m in 2012) on £14.8m turnover. Dorfman should easily be worth £550m after tax.
62= £550m Jack Petchey
Petchey Holdings
Petchey Holdings has a commercial portfolio worth in excess of £500m which includes industrial, retail and mixed-use assets and a large central London residential portfolio predominantly within prime London locations around Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster. While Petchey is mainly an investment vehicle, it also has a number of joint venture development projects working with a range of JV partners including developers, architects and other professionals delivering anything from a luxury residential apartment, multiple housing and apartment developments and mixed-use schemes. It is currently focused on the expansion of its industrial portfolio purchasing investments within London and the South East with recent acquisitions in London, Surrey, Essex, Kent and Sussex. Founder Jack Petchey first earned money running errands before working after the war as a taxi driver. Using his £39 army gratuity, he built a fleet of taxis. He later expanded into used cars, property and timeshare. In 2006 and 2007, Essex-based Petchey sold around £225m of stakes in six companies. Further sales in 2013 netted Petchey more than £50m. He plans to give the bulk of his fortune to the Jack Petchey Foundation, and has given more than £75m since 1999 to supporting youth projects. Despite his giving, we value Petchey at £550m.
64 £540m John Magnier
Sloane Capital
Sloane Capital, the property investment vehicle of Irish racing tycoon John Magnier and business partner JP McManus is run by Limerick entrepreneur Aidan Brooks. It has been buying trophy assets in major cities such as Los Angeles. In London Sloane also owns Unilever House, EC4, (bought for £170m in 2005) and a hotel in Canary Wharf. Yet much of Magnier’s wealth stems from horse breeding and property. He controls the Coolmore racing empire, with studs in Co Tipperary, Kentucky and Australia. McManus and Magnier have a 22.4% stake in the pub group Mitchells & Butlers worth £350m. The pair also had a £227m stake in Manchester United, the premiership football club until they sold out to the Glazer family, in 2005, netting a £90m profit. Magnier also made £23m from the sale of a 13% stake in Devro, the Scottish sausage skin maker. Magnier also has a 20% stake in Barchester, a profitable nursing home operation and 33% of the Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados. He shared in a £40m windfall in 2006, selling an option on a London office site. With McManus and Desmond, he also sold the Next Generation fitness chain for around £132m. Sloane Capital’s property portfolio is now worth around £860m though with hefty borrowings. Magnier also has homes in Spain, Ireland, Barbados and Switzerland, where he lives. He is easily worth £540m.
65 £535m JP McManus
Sloane Capital
JP McManus, a former Irish bookie and legend in racing circles, is a partner in Sloane Capital, a London-based property investor run by Irish investor Aidan Brooks with £860m of assets. It has extensive interests in luxury developments worldwide including Unilever House, EC4, (bought in 2005 for £170m) and the Hilton Hotel in Canary Wharf, E14. McManus and Magnier have a 22.4% stake in the pub group Mitchells & Butlers worth £350m. The pair also had a £227m stake in Manchester United, until they sold out to new United owner, Malcolm Glazier, in 2005, netting a £90m profit. McManus also shared a £125m dividend from the Barchester Healthcare group in 2006 and also shared the £132m proceeds from the sale of a fitness chain. McManus, based in Geneva, is also one of the top racehorse owners in Ireland, with more than 100 horses in training and a stud in Co Kildare. He is reckoned to have made £250m over the years from playing the foreign exchange markets. In all he is now easily worth £535m.
66 £525m Zameer Choudrey & family
Bestway
An accountant, Choudrey, has for 10 years been chief executive of Bestway, the West London based cash and carry giant which also has a £500m property portfolio. In 2012-13 Bestway profits hit a record £164.3m on £1.957bn sales while the separate Bestway Northern added £20m profit and £561m sales. The pair should be worth £2.5bn. Choudrey, a nephew of Sir Anwar Pervez, Bestway’s founder, has a £505m stake. We add £20m for other assets.
67= £500m The Clarke family
C Le Masurier
Le Masurier, Jersey’s largest privately owned developer, is working on J1, a St Helier grade-A office development, which will provide 280,000 sq ft of badly needed space locally. The £150m scheme is
self-funded by the company, which dates back to 1835 and is still owned by the founding Clarke family. Today it has large tracts of St Helier, retail outlets and pub sites across Jersey. It also owns property in the UK, Luxembourg, Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. The death of patriarch Fred Clarke in 2001 led to the switch from wines and spirits to property. We keep the Clarke family fortune at £500m until the J1 development is complete.
67= £500m Leo Noé & family
F&C REIT
Noé, one of the shrewdest property men in Britain, runs F&C REIT, a property business which was partially taken over recently by the Bank of Montreal in a £708m deal. The management had a 30% stake in the business. Past property deals have boosted the Noé wealth: two sales of shopping centres and retail parks in 2004 and 2005 resulted in a £137m profit for Noé companies. We keep Noé at £500m for now.
69= £480m Sir Ronald Hobson
Alhambra Properties
Sir Ronald Hobson originally teamed up with Sir Donald Gosling (qv) after the war to build car parks on old bomb sites in London and the rest of Britain. They sold the parent company, National Parking Corporation in 1998, collecting around £290m each plus hefty dividends up until the sale. In 2004-05, they divested themselves of further property companies, Consolidated Property Investments and later Metrose Property, for a total of £189m. The low-key Hobson should have made around £97m from those two deals. He still has £18m of stakes in some fast-growing property companies including Alhambra Properties. Knighted in 2006 for services to charity, his Hobson Charity raised its net assets by £4m to £32.55m in 2012-13. We raise Hobson to £480m.
69= £480m Ching Chiat Kwong
Oxley Holdings
A Bloomsbury-style neighbourhood on the banks of the Thames in Docklands is the ambitious goal of architects Glenn Howells, whose design for the 3,385-home Royal Wharf scheme, is “inspired by the success of London’s landed estates, with its uncomplicated pattern of streets and squares”. It is Singaporean developer Oxley which is turning this dream into a reality, having snapped up Royal Wharf in late 2013 for £200m. Oxley was founded and is run by a former policeman Ching Chiat Kwong. The company is performing strongly with a five-fold jump in revenues to $788m (£504m) for the nine months ending March. Once known for its shoe-box apartments, Oxley got a boost from recently completed industrial parks and its London expansion. It has already sold three quarters of the 811 apartments in phase one of Royal Wharf. Ching’s other interests include a stake in NewSat, an Australian satellite communications firm. Oxley floated on the Singapore stock market in 2010 and it is now valued at over £780m. Kwong’s stake and other wealth take him to £480m.
69= £480m Roy Richardson & family
Swiftfire
Freeman’s Reach in Durham City is on course to become the UK’s first city centre development incorporating a hydro power generator following the installation of an innovative new water turbine. An Archimedean screw will harvest energy from the River Wear to drive a 100kw generator that is capable of supplying 75% of the total needed from the scheme, where Richardson Capital is part of the development consortium. The family is now headed by Roy Richardson following the death of his twin brother, Don, in 2007. The Richardson twins will be best remembered for the transformation of the 300-acre former Round Oak Steelworks into the Merry Hill Shopping Centre which they sold in 1992 for a £50m profit. In 2004 they sold their flagship office development, No 1 Colmore Square, to overseas investors for £90m. The Richardson’s new main company, Dukehill, showed £119m net assets in 2013, when it made a £10m loss. There are £10m net assets in smaller Richardson companies. Other deals in Europe and the UK plus £54m of salaries in recent years take the Richardson family to at least £480m.
72= £475m Tony Gallagher
Gallagher UK
A Midlands developer, Gallagher built the prestigious Warwick Gates Business Park. A wide spread of activities including retail parks and around 35,000 housebuilding plots have helped Gallagher come through the recession in good shape. Two of his main companies – Countywide Developments and JJ Gallagher – showed healthy net assets of £233m in 2012-13. Other assets take Gallagher to £475m.
72= £475m Peter Jones
Phones International
TV Dragon Jones now has a portfolio of more than 30 businesses where he has investments worth £180m. In recent years he has made £87m from sales of businesses, showing that TV stardom has not side-tracked Jones from his business activities. His business career started with a tennis coaching enterprise. In 1998, he set up his Phones International telecoms operation. Today his telecoms and technology operations globally should make more than £10m profit on £300m turnover in 2014. Jones also has properties in Barbados, Switzerland and Portugal plus British assets worth in total as much as £160m. Still the richest dragon in the den, Jones is worth £475m.
74 £472m Lord Edmiston
IM Properties
Lord Edmiston’s IM Properties is buying Blythe Valley Park, in the Midlands, for £130m from French bank Natixis. The deal followed IM’s purchase of Solihull’s Fore Business Park for £21m. In all it has £1bn of property owned and under management within the UK, Europe and the US. Edmiston, who once worked as an accountant at the defunct Jensen sports car operation, built the Birmingham-based IM Group into one of Britain’s biggest importers of Far Eastern cars. In 2013, IM made £21.2m profit on £400m sales. It should be worth its £472m net asset figures. IM Properties is one of its biggest subsidiaries and it has showed a sharp rise in its net assets to £323m in 2013. It is on track to almost double its 2013 profit of £16.6m in 2014. It is building its development pipeline and rebalancing its portfolio towards high-quality prime and institutional-grade properties while divesting its European portfolio. Since 1998 Edmiston has had £79m in salaries from IM Group, but he has given more than £120m to charity. We value him at £472m.
75 £470m Jonas Kamprad
Landprop
Kamprad is one of the sons of Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of the Ikea furniture stores chain. With his father now retired, Kamprad is being groomed to take a key role at Ikea. Ikea is active in the UK property market. Strand East, a 26-acre plot near London’s Olympic Park, E15, is where Ikea subsidiary LandProp is building a $500m (£320m) eco-city, with 1,200 rental homes, along with commercial buildings and leisure facilities. Similar projects are underway in central Europe, while Ikea hunts for land in other cities to create even bigger districts. Meanwhile, under the brand Ulito, Ikea plans to build student apartments, with health clubs and bars, all over Europe. Kamprad is currently a director and small shareholder in Jesson & Co, a City restaurant operation best known for its Noble Rot restaurant and club in Mayfair which had £154,000 net assets in 2012-13. London-based Kamprad is valued at £470m in the December 2013 Swedish Rich List in Veckans Affärer magazine.
76 £454m Fawn & India Rose James & family
Soho Estates
The Raymond Revuebar, a key part of the late Paul Raymond’s Soho empire, has recently reopened after a restoration. It is part of the £45m redevelopment of Walkers Court in the heart of Soho being undertaken by Soho Estates. Raymond’s granddaughters, sisters Fawn and India Rose James, now control the central London estate and is busy giving it a makeover to remove its old sex shop image. Soho Estates recently added to the 67 of the 80 acres it owns locally by buying the block formerly owned by Foyles bookshop. Paul Raymond, who died in early 2008, built up his Soho land holdings from the early 1970s. The parent company, Soho Estates Holdings, looks in fine fettle with record profits of £19.6m on £28.9m turnover and net assets rising sharply to £454m in 2013-14. We value the family on the net assets.
77= £450m Anthony Lyons
St James Capital
Proposals were drawn up for an eight-storey, mixed-use scheme on underground brewery vaults near the Barbican, EC1. London City Shopping Centre and Lamb’s Passage Real Estate, whose shareholders include Anthony Lyons, lodged plans with Islington council late in 2013 to redevelop. It includes vaults associated with the nearby Grade II listed Whitbread Brewery. The £55m scheme comprises a shop, hotel, flats, offices and restaurants. Lyons sold his home in Hampstead for £43m in early 2010 and moved to the Bahamas. But he has not stopped his dealmaking. Working with Sir Philip Green’s stepson Brett Palos, Lyons made a £27.5m profit in a year on the sale of the O2 centre, NW3. Other key investments have been sold in a deal spree worth £1bn. It was in 2007 when just a month before the credit crunch struck that Lyons and his partners sold half of Earls Court, SW5, and Olympia, W14, in a deal that valued it at £380m and later sold the rest. In 2004 Lyons co-founded Matterhorn Capital, a real estate investment vehicle which, with a predecessor company, has invested approximately £1.5bn in a variety of real estate, hospitality and other projects. Lyons has invested heavily in Data Centres and completed two purchases, which have an estimated end value of £400m. He is now concentrating on FES, a global lighting business. With the deal flurry, we value Lyons at £450m now.
77= £450m Ian Suttie
First Oil
Ian Suttie is part of a consortium of developers behind a £700m housing plan to build a new 3,000-home community to the west of Aberdeen. The plans were narrowly backed by councillors in August. An accountant, Suttie qualified in 1971 and later worked for the US conglomerate ITT before moving back to Aberdeen in the early 1980s to join the oil industry. He led a management buyout of the Orwell oil company in 1986 and had a 72.5% stake when it was later taken over in a $250m (£160m) deal. He spent part of his proceeds buying First Oil. It is in turn buying up oil fields in the North Sea. First Oil should make £50m profit in 2013-14. Suttie’s other oil-related company, Nautronix, was sold for £42m. First Oil is worth £400m. With property and other oil-related investments, Suttie is conservatively worth £450m.
79= £440m Sir Donald Gosling
Alhambra Properties
Gosling has given £25m to help in the restoration of HMS Victory, demonstrating his abiding love affair with the Royal Navy. With partner Sir Ronald Hobson (qv), he started the National Parking Corporation in 1948. Fifty years later they sold it, netting around £290m each. They had hefty dividends over the years. Other property company sales netted Gosling a further £97m. Gosling and Hobson still have three small but fast-growing property companies, including Alhambra Properties, with £24m net assets between them in 2013-14. Gosling makes his hefty charitable donations though the Gosling Foundation which saw its net assets rise to £83m in 2012-13. We push Gosling up to £440m.
79= £440m Caspar MacDonald-Hall
London & Cambridge Properties
Proudreed, a Southampton property group, secured £40m of funding for the Royal Bank of Scotland in June. The five-year loan is supported by a portfolio of retail and industrial commercial assets, including an Asda store in Basingstoke. The deal refinances existing indebtedness. Proudreed is one of the property companies where low-key property investor, Caspar Macdonald-Hall, has a stake. His main operation is London & Cambridge Properties. One of Britain’s largest private property companies, its net assets hit £530m in 2013-14 when it made a record £43.1m profit on £89.7m turnover. MacDonald-Hall has a 40% stake. We can also see another £196m of net assets attributable to MacDonald-Hall and his family in five other separate companies including Proudreed and AIM, an aviation group. In all with past dividends etc, he should be worth £440m.
79= £440m David Wilson & family
Davidsons Developments
David Wilson’s Davidsons Developments, saw its profits hit £5.3m on £37.1m sales in the nine months to the end of 2013. It is worth its near £83m net assets. The housebuilding to commercial property group has a strong reputation for quality work and every home it builds has a unique stone or wooden “rose” insignia built into the structure of the building. As its website states: “After all, if you are buying the work of a five-star builder, then the Davidsons’ aim would be that further generations of your family should be able to recognise it and feel pride in owning one of our homes.” Wilson’s first fortune came from Leicestershire-based Wilson Bowden which floated on the stock market in 1987. Twenty years later it was sold to Barratt Developments in a £2.2bn deal, which netted £727m for the Wilson family in a mix of £304m in cash and the rest in Barratt shares. His remaining Barratt stake is now worth £66m. Past proceeds, dividends and the Davidsons’ stake take the Wilson family to £440m after tax.
82 £430m Sten Mortstedt & family
CLS Holdings
London property group CLS Holdings received planning permission in September for the redevelopment of Westminster Tower on the Albert Embankment. The redevelopment includes a new Portland stone façade, the addition of three additional storeys providing 23 privately owned residential units and 11 shared-ownership units, creating 1,441m² (15,500 sq ft) of office space and a residents’ gym and amenity space. CLS is run by Mortstedt, a low-key Swede. He and his family trusts have a £342m stake in the quoted operation, which is now worth £587m. CLS floated on the London stock market in 1994. Share sales of more than £97m and other assets take the family to perhaps £430m after tax.
83 £425m Terry Bramall & Family
4Urban
It was in 1968 that Bramall joined the Doncaster-based Keepmoat construction group, co-founded by his father. The business, specialising in social housing, was sold in 2007 for £783m. The Bramall family had a 72% stake. Bramall is also financing developer 4Urban and is the largest shareholder in struggling championship club, Doncaster Rovers, into which he and fellow Keepmoat director, Dick Watson, have sunk £17m since 2006. They each have a 24% stake. Bramall was awarded a CBE in the 2013 New Year’s Honours list for his charitable work. In 2008 he put £96m into his charitable foundation. After-tax and his charitable work, Bramall should be worth £425m.
84= £410m Alisa Moussaieff & family
Moussaieff Jewellers
Its Park Lane and Bond Street boutiques make Moussaieff one of the most exclusive jewellers in the world. Its profits are pretty exclusive too, at a record £32.4m on £92.4m sales in 2012-13. The family, descended from Genghis Khan’s goldsmith, is led by Alisa, and she owns all the £360m operation. In 2005, the Moussaieff family sold Camden Stables, NW1, to Richard Caring (qv) for £40m and in 1999, and was reckoned to have made a £25m profit on investments in Canary Wharf. With the other family property assets added, the Moussaieffs should be worth £410m after tax.
84= £410m Charlotte Townshend
Addison Developments
Townshend has 20 choice acres round London’s exclusive Holland Park, and 15,000 acres in Dorset, where she has her main home. She also had 3,000 acres in Nottinghamshire, but these were sold for £9m. We can see nine farming and estate companies including Cygnet and Addison Developments, with around £73.5m of net assets in 2012-13 (up £4m). With exclusive London prices still strong, we value Townshend at £410m.
86= £400m Guy & Alex Dellal & family
Allied Commercial Holdings
The death of Jack Dellal in October 2012 at the age of 89 robbed London of one of its shrewdest property men. Dellal made his mark in the early 1970s, selling his Dalton Barton bank for £58m. He made £75m in 1987 by buying and quickly selling on Bush House, WC2. He was part of a consortium that sold Shell Mex House, WC2, for £490m in 2007. His main company, Allied Commercial Holdings, turned in a £15.8m profit in 2012-13 while its net assets rose to £56.2m. The Dellal family is represented here by Guy, his son from his first marriage and his grandson Alex, who are the biggest shareholders in Allied Commercial. The wider Dellal family, including his widow Ruanne, should be worth at least £400m after any inheritance tax issues.
86= £400m Chun Hong Wong
Top Spring
In July Kevin McCabe’s Scarborough Group entered into a joint venture with companies in China and Singapore to develop two huge property schemes in Greater Manchester which are worth more than £600m and could provide more than 2,000 properties. The joint venture with Top Spring International Holdings, a Hong Kong-listed real estate developer, and Singapore group Metro Holdings is to develop the second phase of Milliners Wharf in New Islington and Middlewood Locks. The £30m second phase of Milliners Wharf, known as the Hat Box, will provide 144 apartments in an eight-storey building on the Ashton Canal. The first phase was completed in 2010 and comprised 261 apartments. Meanwhile, Middlewood Locks is a proposed new neighbourhood of up to 2,000 new properties as well as commercial space on a 23.6-acre site around the former Manchester Bolton & Bury Canal. This project has a development value of £575m. McCabe, who is best known as chairman of Sheffield United FC, said: “I have known and worked with the directors and management teams of Top Spring and Metro for many years through Scarborough’s extensive activities in China, and have the utmost respect for them.” Chun Hong Wong, chairman and chief executive of Top Spring, said: “We have worked extensively with Scarborough in the People’s Republic of China, over the last 10 years, and are pleased to be continuing our partnership with them in the UK, along with Metro, to deliver two high-quality residential developments in an area of the UK where there is a shortage of good-quality housing supply.” Shenzhen-based Chun Hong Wong sits on the Scarborough board and is valued at around £400m.
88 £382m Simon Fuller
19 Management
Fuller has been a driving force behind the development of soccer in North America since bringing his client David Beckham to LA Galaxy in 2007. Soccer is the fastest growing sport there and Fuller’s insertion of a key clause in Beckham’s MLS contract allowing him to buy a club for a 2007 value of $25m (£16m) was a shrewd move as the current market price for an MLS club has climbed to over $100m. Fuller is now co-owner of the 22nd major league soccer franchise in Miami with Beckham, who with his wife Victoria, is one of Fuller’s top clients. Fuller, a former talent scout, formed his first company, 19 Entertainment, in 1985 and later moved into television with talent programmes such as Pop Idol. Fox TV in America paid £35m to Fuller to create American Idol. Fuller sold 19 Entertainment in 2005 for £100m. His other top clients include tennis star Andy Murray , F1 driver Lewis Hamilton and Olympic champion cyclist Sir Bradley Wiggins. His investments in sport, fashion, TV and music has been extended into hotels and restaurants. In all with his property assets, we raise Fuller to £382m this year.
89 £380m David Lewis & Family
Molyneux Securities
Lewis ran three quoted property firms from the 1970s to the 1990s. He sold one, Hampton Trust, which fetched £100m just before the 1987 crash. His property empire was valued at £100m in 2006. His main company today is Molyneux Securities with £12.7m net assets in 2012-13. But Lewis’s real wealth comes from his 400-strong art collection, housed in Museums and galleries, and could be worth up to £300m. We add £80m for other Lewis assets.
90 £360m Alastair & Michael Powell
Cable Properties and Investments
Cable Properties and Investments, a Teesside operation, has a property portfolio of more than 130 properties to let across the North East and north Yorkshire. The latest addition to its portfolio is a purpose built Call Centre in Sunderland. In all the company showed £116.5m net assets in 2012-13. The Powell brothers, Alastair and Michael, own the business and also Cleveland Cable, Britain’s biggest cable distributor. With two smaller companies added, we can see a total of £18.6m profit and £255m net assets in the combined businesses for 2012-13. They should be worth at least £350m. We add another £10m for other assets to the Powells.
91 £355m Nicholas & Peter Gould
Regis
The Gould brothers, Nicholas and Peter Gould, run a substantial London property group which has diversified from residential property to property development. Their main company Regis Group (Holdings) made £5.3m profit and showed over £81m net assets in 2012-13. But they have substantial housing and property management operations in America. With personal assets added, the Gould brothers are worth £355m.
92= £350m Sir John & Peter Beckwith
Pacific Investments
The Beckwith brothers, Sir John and Peter, sold their London and Edinburgh Trust property group to a Swedish group in 1990 netting £80m. Since then Peter has become a leading shareholder in the Ambassador’s Theatre Group, which was sold in 2013 for around £250m to a private equity group. He has also invested in property. Sir John has been investing in hedge funds, making £33m from the 2010 sale of the Thames River Capital into which he had put £3m. We can see around £52m of net assets in various Beckwith companies. But the brothers have also invested in
sports-related businesses and sold them at a profit of at least £50m. In all the Beckwiths should still be worth £350m.
92= £350m Roderick Evans & family
Evans Property Holdings
Leeds-based Evans Property Group has a development pipeline with an end value of more than £1bn and net assets of £350m. Between 2005 and 2007, it sold £600m of investments, including a £425m portfolio, to Leo Noé’s (qv) REIT Asset Management, leaving it with a £350m portfolio. The Evans family, led by Evans as managing director, floated the company on the stock market in 1971 but took it private in 1999 in a £164m deal. With other assets, we value the Evans family at £350m.
92= £350m Henry Moser & family
Jerrold Holdings
Jerrold Holdings specialises in secured lending to both residential and commercial customers. The Manchester-based operation was co-founded in 1973 by Moser who left school at 16 and worked on market stalls as a trader. Jerrold made £52m profit on £130m sales in 2013-14. Barclays Private Equity invested £113.5m for a 30% stake in 2006. The Moser family retains a 50% stake in the £500m operation. Past dividends and any sale proceeds should take the Moser family to £350m.
95= £340m Manfred Gorvy & family
Dorrington
South African-born accountant Manfred Gorvy runs London-based Hanover Acceptances which he founded in 1974. It is now a highly successful property, food and financial services group. Among its businesses is property group Dorrington. It has a residential and commercial property portfolio, which is reportedly valued at more than £550m. Its residential portfolio of more than 4,000 units, principally flats, comprises a mix of private rented properties, regulated and assured tenancies, ground rents and life tenancies. Dorrington dates back to 1936 when it was a residential investment and development company. It listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1959 and was subsequently taken private by Hanover Acceptances in 1980. Other Hanover businesses include Gerber Foods Holdings, one of Europe’s largest fruit juice makers, while its African Realty Trust is southern Africa’s biggest citrus-fruit grower. Hanover Acceptances saw its profits soar to £30.3m (from £4.4m) on £567.4m sales and showed sharply higher net assets of £382m in 2013. Dorrington’s net assets in the same period jumped from £227m to £323m. Hanover Acceptances should be worth its net assets and it is owned by the Gorvy family while past dividends should take the family to £340m.
95= £340m The Duke of Northumberland
Northumberland Estates
Northumberland’s fiercely opposed plans to build more than 200 houses in his home town of Alnwick have been given the green light by his local council. His Northumberland Estates is driving development plans on the 120,000 acres it controls. All this activity stems from Northumberland’s pressing need to find cash for restoration and repair work at Alnwick, which he inherited from his late brother, the 11th duke, in 1995. He raised £22m by selling a Raphael painting in 2004. He put £8.8m into the Alnwick Garden Trust, a charity redeveloping and managing the Alnwick Garden. His Northumberland acres, the valuable 200 acres at Syon Park on the Thames, the 3,000-acre Albury Estate in Surrey, the £2.6m Dryburgh Estate in Scotland, and £23m of net assets in companies including Hotspur Forestry, take Northumberland to £340m with rising land and art prices.
97= £330m Michael Cohen
Och-Ziff
Cohen, an American hedge fund manager who became a British citizen, headed up the European arm of the $35bn (£22bn) Och-Ziff hedge fund until he left last year. Cohen’s regulatory filings on Wall Street showed that between 2006 and 2012 he banked £283m in share awards and has another £132m in stock. With some choice properties we value Cohen at £330m.
97= £330m William Ives & family
Rainham Steel
Ives, a straight-talking Eastender, started Rainham Steel in 1973 as a new and reusable steel supplier. The company diversified and started to target builders and builders’ merchants in the 1980s. Essex-based Rainham made £5m profit in 2012-13 and is growing strongly in the current year. Ives and his family trusts own the £160m operation. Hefty investments in property and other assets take Ives to £330m.
97= £330m The Queen
Crown Estate
The Queen must sometimes regret the 1760 decision by then George III to hand over the income from the Crown Estate to the Treasury in return for the Civil List. The Crown Estate produced another record-breaking performance in 2013-14. Profits hit £267m (up from £253m in the previous year) while the total value of the estate’s property assets rose to nearly £10bn. The Crown Estate is also growing: in August it joined with the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund to buy a 64.2% stake in the Pollen Estate in Mayfair for £381m. Still this is all good news for Her Majesty. Under new financing rules, she gets 15% of the Crown Estate profits via the Sovereign Grant, which replaces the old Civil List. So the rising profit means a rising income for her. Still, we do not count the Crown Estate assets as hers as she does not have control over them. In her personal capacity, we believe the Queen’s investment portfolio, consisting largely of blue-chip British companies’ shares, should have grown in line with recent surging stock markets to £105m. With rising land and estate prices we add £10m to last year’s figure for personal property such as Sandringham, Balmoral and smaller houses along with the Royal Stud, taking this element to £135m. Her personal art is worth just £2m, though the Royal Collection, which we don’t count as her wealth, is worth perhaps £10bn. Adding the royal stamp collection, jewels, cars, horses and the Queen Mother’s legacy should take the Queen to £330m.
104 £318m Kathy & Bernard & Caroline Murphy & family
Folgate
The late John Murphy was one of the great Irish builders of Britain right up to his death at age 95 in 2009. He left a depressed Ireland in the late 1930s and made his mark in Britain, building and repairing airfields in the war. In the post-war period, he worked on many large projects such as the Heathrow expansion, the Isle of Grain power station, the Channel Tunnel rail link and right up to his death his green vans were all over London on infrastructure projects including preparation work for the 2012 Olympics. The company J Murphy is still thriving and in 2013 its parent made £34.6m profit on £666m sales. With £220m net assets it is easily worth that sum. There is also the separate Folgate Holdings property operation which is worth its £133m net assets. The family is now headed by Kathy, John Murphy’s second wife and Bernard, his son from his first marriage. Perhaps the most colourful family member is daughter Caroline, a Unite union delegate, who is at odds with the rest of the family over her efforts to turn the company into a workers’ co-operative. She is stepping down as deputy chairman and committing her near 20% stake into a employee share scheme. We clip that off the construction operation and value the family stake there at £176m, adding £142m for the property company and other assets.
105 £315m John Kirkland & family
Bowmer & Kirkland
Peveril Securities, part of Belper-based Bowmer and Kirkland is developing a £75m speculative mixed-use project in Edinburgh. The project, at 3-8 St Andrew Square, is a joint venture between Peveril Securities and Standard Life Investments Pooled Pension Property Fund and consists of 105,000 sq ft of grade-A offices and 85,000 sq ft of retail and residential apartments. This followed on from Bowmer & Kirkland winning a £30m contract to build the new National Performance Centre for Sport at Heriot-Watt University’s Edinburgh campus. Bowmer and Kirkland saw its profits rise slightly from £21.5m to £23m on £660m sales in the year to August 2013. Its development arm operates both independently and in joint venture nationally across all sectors including retail, industrial and commercial developments. John Kirkland joined the family firm in 1967 and became chairman nine years later. With £260.3m net assets, Bowmer & Kirkland is worth that sum. Other assets take the Kirkland family to £315m.
106 £312m Harry Hyams
Walton Investment Co
The son of an East End bookie, Hyams was one of London’s top developers in the 1960s and 1970s,and best known for Centre Point, WC1, – the 35-storey tower in central London. His real coup was to buy a stake in the Oldham Estates group in 1959 for £50,000. In two later deals he made £248m from its takeover. Hyams has stakes worth £7m in three small property companies in 2012-13 and should be worth £312m.
107 £310m Sir Paul & Lady Smith
Colston Property Partners
It was in 1961 when 15-year-old Smith started working in a Nottingham warehouse. Nine years later he opened his first shop in Nottingham. His fashion empire now extends worldwide with 200 stores in Japan and plans to open in China. Significant investment in a new London store clipped profits at Paul Smith Group Holdings by 25% to £23.8m in 2012-13. A Japanese company bought a 40% stake in 2006 from Lady Smith and a business partner. With £138m net assets the business should easily be worth £400m. Smith’s stake is worth £240m. Other assets and his stake in the Colston property company (with £44m net assets) take the Smiths to £310m.
108 £307m Xu Weiping
ABP
Chinese developer ABP won planning consent in July for its £1bn financial district in Royal Albert Dock E16. The 4.7m sq ft Farrell’s-designed scheme which was unveiled in May 2013 should be London’s third financial district. The first phase covers 1.4m sq ft. The 32-acre industrial land is currently filled with empty warehouses and unused docks and is connected to the rest of London by a light railway. Nonetheless it is proving controversial. Chairman of ABP Xu Weiping says that the complex will be built to target a specific group of businesses. “We are building a new district. The costs are relatively low. The companies we are selling to are very different from the ones that rent from Canary Wharf. They are mostly established Chinese firms stepping their foot into the European market,” Xu reckons. He hopes to sell 60-70% of the space and rent out the rest. The site, to be known as Asian Business Port, is the largest investment by a Chinese company in the UK. London mayor Boris Johnson claims the development will be worth £6bn to the capital’s economy. Xu Weiping’s wealth is a relatively modest £307m. We can see some of it in his British company, ABP London (Investment) Ltd with more than £16m assets in 2012-13.
109= £300m Sukhpal Singh Ahluwalia
Dominvs
Euro Car Parts was sold for £285m in 2011 to Chicago-based LKQ Corporation. Ahluwalia, its founder, was a refugee from Idi Amin’s Uganda. Spotting a gap in the market, he borrowed £5,000 to start the London-based business when he was 18, supplying parts for the German car brands such as BMW and Mercedes. Ahluwalia, chaired the European arm until June 2014 when he left to pursue his property-focused asset management firm Dominvs Group that he is building with his sons and charitable work in India and Africa.
109= £300m Adam & Sam Kaye & family
Amberstar
The Kaye family owns a significant number of properties on Britain’s high streets. We can see nearly £50m of net assets in the 2013 account of Kaye family property companies including Kropifko Properties and Amberstar. But the family is best known for its extraordinary success with restaurants. The patriarch of the family, Phillip Kaye and his late brother Reginald, started as Wimpy franchisees before going on to launch their own chains. The family made at least £82m from the sale of five restaurant chains including Deep Pan Pizza and Ask. Today the family, led by Phillip’s sons Adam and Sam, with cousin Jonathan, Reginald’s son, have a £173m stake in the quoted Prezzo restaurant operation, which is being sold to a private equity company. They also have £25m of stakes in another restaurant group Tasty and the Everyman cinema group. In all the Kayes are worth £300m after tax.
109= £300m Roy MacGregor & family
MacGregor Properties
Starting work in his family supermarket operation which was sold in 1985, MacGregor started MacGregor Energy Services, which was sold in 1997 for £20m. He began again with Global Energy (Holdings) in 2005 making, inspecting and repairing oil rigs. In 2012 MacGregor sold a 25% stake to the Japanese company Mitsui to fund international expansion. It has since bought four Australian companies. Profits hit £25.5m on £358m sales in 2012-13. With £86m net assets, it is a £350m operation. The MacGregor family has 75%. Other assets such as MacGregor Properties, with £17.2m net assets, and SPL football club Ross County take the MacGregor family to £300m.
109= £300m Christopher Moran
Chesterlodge
Christopher Moran has hosted everyone from the Queen to David Cameron at Crosby Hall, his Grade II listed, 85-room riverside home in Chelsea. He has recently applied for planning permission to create a chapel in the basement. The proposed place of worship is under the Great Hall, which was the room – originally in Bishopsgate, but relocated to west London in 1910 – where Thomas More wrote Utopia. Moran, who bought the historic property for £100,000 in 1988, has spent the past two decades restoring and rebuilding the house spending at least £50m. Chesterlodge, Moran’s main holding company, showed a £4.8m profit on £14.7m sales in 2012-13. It is worth its near £259m net assets. We add £41m for his London home (after restoration costs are deducted).
109= £300m Andreas Panayiotou
Ability Developments
Heath Hall, a Grade II listed, restored and extended arts and crafts home in the exclusive Bishop’s Avenue, has been developed by Andreas Panayiotou. Its asking price is around £65m. Panayiotou bought it in 2006 for about £14m. He spent a further £40m on extending and refurbishing the house. Panayiotou, a former boxer of Cypriot parentage, lives in upmarket Epping though he was born in London’s East End. He worked in his father’s dry cleaning business before forming property group Ability Group in 1996. He famously sold much of his reported £1bn buy-to-let property portfolio in 2007 just before the crash. Ability, with hotel and property interests, showed net assets of £114.4m in 2013, down £20m on the previous year. In all Panayiotou should now be worth £300m.
109= £300m Marquess of Salisbury
Gascoyne Cecil Estates
Leicester Square’s Vue Cinema was purchased in April by a UK pension fund for £23.46m. The nine-screen, 2,500-person cinema comprises a 22-year leasehold interest from freeholders Gascoyne Estates and is being acquired at an initial yield of over 8.25%. Gascoyne Estates is of course the property company owned by the Marquess of Salisbury and his family. Salisbury’s Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, completed in 1612, is a treasure trove of paintings worth £150m. In addition, there is Cranborne Manor, the family estate in Dorset. Together they have 10,300 acres. His main farming company, Gascoyne Cecil Farms, and four others show nearly £10m net assets. There is the London estate with valuable acreage around Leicester Square and American assets. Rising values for land and art take Salisbury to £300m.
109= £300m Geoffrey Warren
Car Giant
A £5bn new town on the banks of the Grand Union Canal is being planned for the vast Cargiant supermarket site at Old Oak Common. The world’s biggest motor dealership wants to build around 9,500 homes and a new high street on the sprawling 45-acre site in west London it has occupied for 34 years. Other elements of the vision include a “cultural hub” in the Art Deco former Rolls-Royce car maintenance works building that now serves as Cargiant’s HQ, a primary and secondary school and a new dock on the canal for leisure craft. It hopes to open up a neglected stretch of the Grand Union in the same way that the regeneration of the Regent’s Canal and City Road Basin have transformed parts of Islington. The scheme, which will be submitted for planning permission next year, puts the car supermarket on a collision course with Queens Park Rangers, the football club it once sponsored. QPR has launched its own consultation on proposals for a new 40,000-seater stadium on the land owned by Cargiant, but the company says it has no plans to enter into a partnership with the Premier League club. Cargiant is owned by Warren. The business saw its profits rise 69% to £30.3m in 2013 on sales up 31% at £396m. It is easily worth £200m. Property developments take Warren to £300m.
116= £290m Iris Gibbor & family
CP Holdings
Iris Gibbor runs CP Holdings, the Watford-based conglomerate founded by her late father, Sir Bernard Schreier, in the 1950s. Schreier who escaped the Nazis in Austria in 1939, settled in Palestine and joined the British army during the war. After later serving with the Israeli army during its 1948 war of independence, he built up a sizeable contracting business which built Israel’s first dam. After the Suez crisis he came to Britain and started CP. Today its interests range from hotels, car dealerships (both in Hungary) and a serviced office business, called Lenta Properties, which showed more than £24.7m net assets in 2013. CP Holdings as a whole saw its 2013 profits rise from £12.4m to £14.7m on sales of £434.2m. Its stake in the Hungarian-quoted Danubia Hotels operation is worth around £90m. CP’s net assets stand at nearly £269m. We add £21m for past dividends and other assets to Gibbor and the Schreier family. Sir Bernard died in June 2013 aged 95.
116= £290m Robert Rayne & family
Derwent London
Quoted property group Derwent London has seen its share price hit record highs in early November, valuing the business at more than £3bn. It was launched as a central London developer in 1984. It creates “villages” in the side streets of London’s prime and up-and-coming business districts. Of the 5.7m sq ft in its portfolio, 97% is currently located in central London, with a specific focus on the West End and the areas bordering the City of London. But it is now looking at Battersea. Derwent London is chaired by Rayne, the son of legendary property tycoon Lord Rayne, who died in 2003. His death cost London of one of its shrewdest property developers. After war service with the RAF, Lord Rayne turned his family’s tailoring operation into a property business and pioneered development on the fringe of the City. The Rayne company, London Merchant Securities merged with Derwent Valley, another property group, in February 2007 to create Derwent London. Lord Rayne left £119.6m in his British will which excluded assets in France. The Rayne family and trusts have a £270m stake in Derwent London . The family also has a £30m stake in investment company LMS Capital. After hefty charitable donations we value the Raynes at £290m.
118 £286m Steve & Clive Boultbee Brooks
Boultbee
Steve and Clive Boultbee Brooks are now looking at investing £200m in the UK property market after a five-year absence. The Boultbee Brooks brothers – Steve a mechanical engineer and intrepid polar explorer, and Clive, a chartered surveyor – grew up on a farm in Staffordshire though their father was a stockbroker. They sold their cars in 1987 for £5,000 to take on the property world. They started by buying and redeveloping industrial space in Shoreditch, on the fringes of the City, and turning it into offices. In the 1990s they developed office and industrial space in the Midlands. After narrowly surviving the property crash, they turned to retail, buying shopping centres across the UK and the continent. The brothers have done well out of the Nordic region in recent years, selling Helsinki’s Kamppi shopping centre for around £358m in 2008 and three Swedish shopping centres for £125m in 2010. A new company Boultbee Brooks Real Estate has been launched by Clive Boultbee Brooks and it has plans to spend £100m on development opportunities in Leeds, Manchester, Reading and east London. Clive, who maintains a joint venture relationship with Boultbee Land, the firm he founded with his brother Steve in 1987, is also set to return to Europe. Their main companies, Boultbee Construction, Boultbee Finance and SB Squared Holding, showed £156m net assets in their latest 2012-13 accounts. There are around another £30m of net assets in smaller companies. Other company assets and profits on sales of assets should add £100m.
119 £280m Robert Earl
Earl of Sandwich
A restaurateur, Earl paid £9m for 23% of Everton, the Merseyside football club in 2006. He has also been expanding his restaurants through his newly created Earl Enterprises operation. His Italian restaurant venture Buca di Peppo, bought for £30m in 2009, is expanding across America and in to the UK. It should now be worth £190m. His other operation the Earl of Sandwich, a chain of takeaway outlets, has opened in the City. With the Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino in Vegas flourishing, the Earl family property portfolio and other family interests, his total worth is now £280m.
120= £275m David Gabbay & family
O&H Capital
Established in 1982, the O&H Group is a privately owned London property group business with more than 50 employees. It has property interests throughout the UK and prides itself in the quality of its investment portfolio, its asset management capability and construction and development experience. O&H’s land holdings exceed 12,000 acres throughout England, mainly in Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire. In 2012-13 it made a £30.8m loss but its net assets rose to £496m. David Gabbay, a canny property man, and his family trusts, have around half the company. With other assets, the Gabbay family should easily be worth £275m.
120= £275m Eli Shahmoon & family
O&H Capital
Established in 1982, the O&H Group is a privately owned London property group business with more than 50 employees. It has property interests throughout the UK and has a strong reputation for the quality of its investment portfolio, its asset management capability and construction and development experience. O&H’s land holdings exceed 12,000 acres throughout England, mainly in Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire. In 2012-13 it made a £30.8m loss but its net assets rose to £496m. Eli Shahmoon and his family trusts, have around half the company. With other assets, the Shahmoon family should easily be worth £275m.
122 £270m Alan Lewis
Hartley Investment Trust
Alan Lewis was not born into great wealth: his Welsh grandfather was a successful entrepreneur but his father gambled away the family’s money. The young Lewis could not afford to go off to university full-time but studied typography at college in Manchester in the evenings while he was working. He made his first fortune by dealing in repossessed cars, but came to prominence in the early 1980s through the battle to control Illingworth Morris, the Yorkshire-based textiles group. Since then he has diversified into other areas such as property, forestry and natural resources. Hartley Investment Trust showed nearly £514m net assets in its 2012-13 accounts. His British property portfolio, principally old industrial sites in Yorkshire, is worth at least £100m. In addition he has 4,000 acres of prime development land in Florida, where gas has been discovered, and forestry in Russia which is equivalent to the size of Wales. With other banking, high-tech and property assets added in Britain, America and Spain, Lewis is worth perhaps £270m in the current climate.
123 £268m Bert & Maurice Allen
Slaney Meats/Bewley Hotels
Bert Allen and his brother Maurice are prominent Wexford tycoons. Ownership of their Slaney meats operation was transferred in 2010 to a British Virgin Isles company called Lotan Holdings. The last accounts in 2008 showed more than £71m net assets. From its profits the Allen brothers built a property portfolio worth £248m, through which they netted around £190m when they sold their Bewley hotel chain in 2007. The Allens reinvested some of this in German property. Other assets include hotels, 18.7% of Gael Electric, an energy company, and a £10m commercial building in Dusseldorf. They also own land around the seaside resort of Courtown and are moving into bioenergy. They should now easily be worth £268m.
124 £267m Edward Atkin & family
CA Holdings
After selling his baby-feeding business, Avent, for £300m to a private equity group in 2005, Atkin has dedicated his time to his foundation and to a Cambridge manufacturing complex called ARCC. Here he is targeting teams from the Royal College of Art, which has a world-class reputation for training industrial designers. Allowing for property, shrewd investments and other assets, we keep the Atkin family at £267m after tax.
25= £260m Stephen Conway & family
Galliard Holdings
An eastender by birth, Stephen Conway left school in 1964 aged 16, and developed his early entrepreneurial spirit through trading, working in a bank and running a market stall at weekends. “When I was a kid, I worked in the market running my own stall. After I left school with five O-levels, my mum wanted me to get a ‘proper job’ paying £6 a week in a bank. But the attraction of getting £40 a week from the market on a weekend was too great to resist,” he recalled. In 1969, he began his career in industrial finance, working for the First National Finance Corporation before being poached to run a small property-lending bank until 1974. Then followed the worst property and banking crash of the century. Conway saw it first hand and learnt the lessons before going to work for a property company until he co-founded Galliard Group in 1991. Loughton-based Galliard made £14.2m profit on £127.74m sales in 2013-14 and it has a £2.4bn portfolio. The £260m business is owned by Conway and his family.
125= £260m John Guthrie & family
Broadland Properties
John Guthrie chairs Broadland Properties, the Scarborough property to farming, energy and leisure operation, which made £1.1m profit on £33.8m sales in 2013. It should be worth its near £230m net assets. It is a leading operator of hydro electric schemes in the UK. Other assets such as White Rose Finance (£6m net assets) and the £22.3m profit that Guthrie made from the 2005 sale of a stake in Merchant Retail to Hong Kong billionaire, Li Ka-Shing should take the Guthrie family to perhaps £260m after tax.
125= £260m Clinton & Spencer & John McCarthy
Churchill Retirement Living
The McCarthy brothers, Clinton and Spencer, run Hampshire-based Churchill Retirement Living, which made a record £17.5m profit on £90m sales in 2013-14. The brothers began by building small developments of stone and thatched houses in Wiltshire in 1994. The venture was a success, leading to them being voted Housebuilder of the Year in 1998 – but it was perhaps inevitable that they would shift their focus to the retirement market. “It’s in our blood,” says Spencer. They learnt all about the retirement home market from their father, John. In 1976, he set up McCarthy & Stone, which was floated on the stock market in 1982. He left in 2004 and sold his stake for £74.4m. Since then he has also joined the family business as a non-executive director. Churchill Retirement Living has built 74 developments across the country, providing thousands of apartments for people over 60. The business has been valued at around £230m while other assets take the McCarthy family to £260m.
128 £255m Mike Clare & family
Clarenco
Clare, the founder of beds retailer Dreams, sold the company in 2008 for £222m. He invested £20m in the business under the new management but that was lost when the business went into administration, though it has since been rescued. Clare’s other investments are doing well and he has eight hotels, commercial and residential property worth £95m in total. His AmaZing Venues operation consists of ‘Exclusive Use’ iconic, unusual properties rented out for weddings and functions. He nearly made up his losses at Dreams from an astute investment in Sunseeker, the luxury yacht maker sold to a Chinese billionaire last year for £320m. After tax and his charitable work through the Clare Foundation, Clare and his family should be worth £255m.
129 £253m Stephen Vernon
Green Property
Stephen Vernon’s Green REIT, the first post-crash listed property fund in Ireland, is beginning to develop several prime office projects in south Dublin city and county. “Offices are where most of the interest will be in the short run, I think,” he said recently. “A lot of retail property was built during the boom, and I think it will be a while before people start building retail, except for maybe extending. There are plans to extend Liffey Valley, and we have plans to extend Blanchardstown as soon as it is possible to do that.” Vernon’s Green Property owns the Blanchardstown Shopping Centre, Europe’s biggest retail hub. Green’s fundraising stage, which was heavily oversubscribed, is now concluded. This has left it with €322m (£257m) in future development and acquisition firepower. Vernon’s Dublin-based Green Property operation also looks in fine fettle with net assets of £406m in 2011-12. Green Property recently agreed to sell a London development property, One Nine Elms, SW8, to Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group for around £90m. Vernon, who went to university in London, joined Green in 1993. Nine years later, Green was taken private via a £700m deal. It recently formed a joint venture with Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund to buy Irish property. Green Property is easily worth its net assets. Vernon has a 62.2% stake worth £253m.
130= £250m Bill Ainscough & family
Langtree Group
Ainscough started as a builder in 1973 and sold half his Chester-based Wain Homes 28 years later, netting £120m. He kept part of the business and renamed it the Wain Group. In all there are four separate family companies including Wain Group and Langtree, with net assets of around £170m in 2012-13. The Ainscough family stakes in all three total around £160m net assets while Wain made £22m profit on £120m sales in 2012-13. With other assets the Ainscough family is worth at least £250m.
130= £250m Abdul Bhatti & family
Bestway
Profits at the West London-based Bestway cash and carry to property group hit a record £164.3m on £1.96bn sales in 2012-13, while the separate Bestway Northern added £20m profit and £561m sales. The Bestway property arm has a £500m portfolio and it has developed 1m sq ft of commercial space in recent years. The whole business is worth £2.5bn together, valuing the stake held by Bhatti, a long-time director, and his family, at £238m. We add £12m for other assets to the Bhatti family.
130= £250m Adalat & Arshad Chaudhary
Bestway
The Chaudhary father and son team, Adalat and Arshad, are directors of the West London-based Bestway cash-and-carry business. Bestway was started in 1976 by Sir Anwar Pervez (qv)and Adalat Chaudhary was a schoolfriend, who later started work for Bestway in its early days. Arsha joined his father in the business in 1984. Profits hit a record £164.3m on £1.957bn sales in 2012-13, while the separate Bestway Northern added £20m profit and £561m sales. There is also a £500m property portfolio within the Bestway empire. The two groups are worth a combined £2.5bn, which values the Chaudhary family stake at £238m. We add £12m for other assets.
130= £250m Firoz Kassam
Firoka (Kings Cross)
Firoz Kassam, the former owner of Oxford United Football Club, spent close to £30m in 2012 on three properties comprising the 1.6-acre Hornbeam estate in London’s plush Bishops Avenue. He is planning to turn them into three mansions and five apartments as part of a £90m luxury development. Tanzanian-born Kassam made his fortune in the hotel trade. His Firoka (Kings Cross) made £3.2m profit in 2013. In all, five separate Kassam companies made nearly £9m profit and showed £172.3m net assets. Other assets take him to £250m.
130= £250m Brian Kennedy
Patrick Properties
Entu, a Manchester-based green energy outfit controlled by Brian Kennedy, the owner of the Sale Sharks premiership rugby union side, raised more than £32m by floating on the AIM in October. Kennedy halved his 60% stake in the float. The son of an Edinburgh window cleaner, Kennedy made his first fortune in kitchens, selling his business in 1988 for £1m. He later moved into home improvements, buying the Everest brand in 1999 for £47m, before selling off parts. He also sold a mobile phones business in 2002 for £31m. His Latium Group merged with a rival in 2012. Kennedy has just under half the enlarged group, Epwin, which floated on the stock market too in the summer and is now worth £140m. Kennedy has a £22m stake there. His total empire has a turnover of around £600m. Other assets including Patrick Properties started in 2002 by Kennedy. It now has a £100m portfolio, comprising 1m sq ft of industrial, 100,000 sq ft of offices and 55,000 sq ft of retail space. An American operation, a wind farm and the Sale Sharks rugby club (into which he has sunk £20m) keep Kennedy at £250m.
130= £250m Nick Leslau
Secure Income REIT
After selling his Max Property operation in July for £448m to the Blackstone private equity group, property entrepreneur Nick Leslau said: “Are we calling the top? Absolutely not. As Baron Rothschild once said, ‘I got rich by selling early’. Blackstone has massive financial resources and has made a knockout bid, so we’ve gone earlier than we thought… We’ve been offered tomorrow’s jam today, so we took the decision to get out.” Leslau’s private Prestbury Investment vehicle should have made around £60m from the deal to sell Max which was set up in the depths of the recession back in 2009. In August Leslau followed this when a package of 14 Travelodge hotels was sold to a consortium, including Goldman Sachs, for £500m. Leslau was part of the selling consortium, which included the Reuben brothers. He was also part of a group which sold a £200m pubs package at the same time to yet another American private equity group. As if this deal making was not enough, Leslau also found time to float Secure Income Real Estate Investment Trust in June. It closed up 22% on its first day of trading with a market capitalisation of £293m. As of early November the shares had soared further valuing the London-based operation at £476m. The stake held by Prestbury Investment Holdings has risen in value to nearly £120m. Leslau trained as a chartered surveyor, and later teamed up with Nigel Wray (qv) in the property market. Today they co-own the Prestbury Investment Holdings operation with £60.8m net assets in 2012. With previous asset sales at the top of the market, Leslau should be worth £250m.
130= £250m Younus Sheikh & family
Bestway
Sheikh, a science graduate with a diploma in manufacturing, is a director of West London-based Bestway, the giant food wholesaler and property operation which has a £500m portfolio. Profits hit a record £164.3m on £1.96bn sales in 2012-13, while the separate Bestway Northern added £20m profit and £561m sales. The two are worth £2.5bn together and the Sheikh family stake is worth £238m. We add £12m for other assets.
137 £240m Nigel Wray
Prestbury
A £6m investment in Domino’s Pizza shares since 1997 by Wray later resulted in share sales totalling £144m by August 2013. This easily justifies the label Britain’s Warren Buffet given to sports memorabilia-mad Wray. He also has stakes in 17 other quoted companies worth around £60m in total. A former share tipster, Wray chairs Saracens, the premiership rugby club, into which he has sunk £30m. Wray has over 47% of property group Prestbury Investment Holdings, with £60.8m net assets in 2012. Wray should be worth £240m after tax.
138= £235m Lord Iliffe & family
Yattendon Investment Trust
Yattendon Group, the Reading-based property, marina, media and agriculture operation, had a good 2013-14 with profits coming in at £5.7m on a £74.4m turnover. Its 19 UK marinas felt the effect of economic recovery and its commercial property activities at the marinas did well, reflecting good occupancy rates. Its 9,000 acres in west Berkshire suffered from the effects of bad weather on farming operations but its residential and commercial property operations performed well. Its Westminster Management operation with properties in Vancouver and Seattle, saw strong occupancy rates and realised good profits on sales. Yattendon Group is owned by the Iliffe family which has solid links to the Midlands. Iliffe inherited the title from his late uncle in 1996. After selling its Birmingham papers in 1987 for £60m, Yattendon still had more than 40 local newspaper titles until their sale for over £18m in 2012. We value the company on its near £221m net assets and the family at £235m overall.
138= £235m Sir Stanley & Peter Thomas
Atlantic Property Developments
Atlantic Properties, the Cardiff-based property operation run by Welsh entrepreneur Peter Thomas, is currently working on developments with an anticipated capital value in excess of £100m. Since its formation in 1988, Atlantic has generated £150m through investment and development. Additionally, through joint ventures, Atlantic has assembled an extensive property portfolio with a combined investment value of over £100m. Peter Thomas and his brother Sir Stanley built up South Wales-based Peter’s Savoury Products, which was sold in 1988 for £75m. The family then built the TBI property to airports group, netting around £106m when it was sold in 2004. A Spanish development, in which Peter had a 40% stake, was sold in 2005 for £75m. There are nearly £36m net assets in his companies including Atlantic Investments (UK). Stanley was knighted in the 2006 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to business and charities in Wales. Peter was awarded the CBE in 2012 for similar reasons. We value the Thomas family at £235m.
140 £222m Charles Clowes
Clowes Developments
Derby-based Clowes Developments purchased the 116-acre site of the former Didcot A power station in April. The site has the potential to be redeveloped for both commercial and residential use, subject to planning consent. Clowes also moved into London with the purchase of a 2.7-acre site in Battersea for £40m in 2013. Clowes founded his East Midlands-based operation in 1964. It made £14.2m profit on £40m sales and had £108.2m net assets in 2013-14. Reports in the property press in the 2007 boom suggested that Clowes had been looking to sell up for £300m. Today we settle for a £220m valuation adding £2m for smaller Clowes companies.
141= £220m Manny Davidson & family
Wolfe Property Services
The Davidson family’s then Asda Property Holdings was started in 1964. It floated on the stock market in 1985, and was taken private in a £232m deal in 2001. The Davidson family’s stake was worth £253m when it was taken over in 2006. Davidson now concentrates on his Wolfe Property Services operation. Other assets and share sales take the Davidson family to £220m after tax.
141= £220m Bhupendra Kansagra & family
Sola Holdings
An Indian entrepreneur, Kansagra sold a £20m stake in the Indian low-cost Spicejet airline in 2010. The London-based Kansagra family has worldwide interests in oil, agriculture, horticulture, mineral processing, hospitality and property. Its main British company, Solai Holdings, made £24.6m profit on £816m sales in 2012-13. With £86m net assets it is worth £200m. Other assets and sale proceeds add a conservative £20m.
141= £220m David Mabey & family
Mabey Holdings
Reading-based, industrial-to-property group Mabey Holdings established its Mabey Property subsidiary in 1986 as Beachley Property. The prime focus of the business is to drive forward its existing portfolio including offices, industrial and retail investment property whose tenants include Boots, Barclays, Allianz Insurance and Medway council. Mabey Property, with £16.5m net assets in 2013, is also involved in the development of commercial property and has carried out retail warehouse developments, office refurbishments and a number of high street retail developments throughout the country. Current projects include 45 acres of residential development land in South Wales and a care home development in Reading. Its parent Mabey Holdings made a £24.2m loss in 2013 but its showed £160.6m net assets. Dividends which have totalled more than £80m since 1996 and the separate Hare Hatch Holdings, which is being liquidated, though solvent and with net assets of £26m, take the Mabey family to £220m after tax and spending. David Mabey heads the family though he is no longer on the board of Mabey Holdings.
141= £220m Gerald Ronson & family
Heron
Ronson is planning to return to housebuilding after more than two decades. His Heron operation has around 10,000 plots in its land bank as well as 2m to 3m sq ft of land for warehousing or industrial use. The news came after Ronson’s £500m Heron Tower, EC2, was rescued from the brink of receivership when a private equity partner came in to put up £288m of the £388m needed to refinance loans. The 42-storey tower’s owners – including Ronson – put up a further £100m as part of the rescue. It is now close to being filled. Ronson has been there before. His Heron operation nearly went bankrupt, a victim of the early 1990s property downturn. Ronson bounced back. In 2013 Heron Property Corporation made a £1.7m loss but its net assets rose £7m to over £178m. His growing Snax 24 petrol retailing business showed £45m net assets in 2013. But it is worth at least £100m. He is also using a new vehicle Ronson Capital Partners to develop luxury projects backed by funding from Ernestom Bertarelli (qv) Ronson recently revealed that over the last 25 years he has given away £35m to charities. We keep him at £220m for now.
141= £220m Neil Taylor & family
Millbourn
Taylor floated his computer games operation – Game – on the stock market in 1998. The Taylor family made around £50m from the float and later sale. Since then Dublin-based Taylor and his two brothers have built a German property portfolio and a range of investments. Last year the family stake in Pure Gym was sold at a profit. With surging house prices in Germany, we raise the Taylors to £220m.
146= £215m Nick Capstick-Dale
UK Real Estate
Nick Capstick-Dale learnt about property working for an estate agency for four years. In 1986, he started trading in property and in 1989, three months before the property crash, he sold all his properties. A year later he was buying back some of his assets at a 40% discount. Since then, through his main company, UK Real Estate, based in London, he has been assembling an impressive long-term portfolio with some stunning buildings in London including Metropolitan Wharf in Wapping, E1, and the old Lighthouse building at King’s Cross. Now, he has more than 80 buildings in central London and his main company, UK Real Estate, showed £76.5m net assets in 2012-13, but other assets take him to £215m.
146= £215m Damien Hirst
Murderme
Damien Hirst recently bought a £34.5m house near Regent’s Park. He also recently opened an art gallery on Ilfracombe’s quay. The gallery, called Other Criteria, opened next to his restaurant 11 The Quay and features works by the artist selling for up to £11,500. The gallery is Hirst’s latest foray in the seaside town, his most famous being the 60ft bronze statue Verity on the pier, which was erected in 2012. Hirst owns four adjoining properties on the Quay and also has a studio at nearby Mullacott Cross where some of his artworks are created. He is also turning his hand to property development and has designed an estate of 500 ecohomes for Ilfracombe which have hidden wind turbines in the roofs, photovoltaic solar panels and advanced insulation. Hirst insists that the development will be a proper community complete with a school, shops and business premises. In London, meanwhile, he is selling the lease on his Other Criteria outpost in Bond Street and moving to bigger premises as he expands his retail and publishing empire. As Britain’s richest artist, Hirst has had better news too on the art front. London’s recent contemporary art sales saw the sale of an early Hirst Away From the Flock (Divided), a 1995 installation involving a sheep that has been dissected and its sliced halves placed, floating, in a tank of formaldehyde. It went at Christie’s for $3m (£1.9m) which was above the $2.8m lowest estimate, leading experts to conclude that the market for Hirst works is stabilising. He made his money before the crash with sale proceeds of £263.4m from 2003 to 2008. Hirst took a 70% cut of all he sold in the boom years, rather than the long established 50-50. We can see around £190m of assets in the 2013 accounts of Murderme, Hirst’s main company, and three other smaller ones. His manager went on record saying he was a billionaire. We think that is a slight exaggeration. With his property assets and other sale proceeds added, we keep Hirst at £215m until we see if the market for his works has really stabilised.
148= £210m Martin Ainscough & family
Ainscough Investments
Ainscough Crane Hire was founded in 1976. Ainscough and his brothers took over running the Wigan-based business in 1984 and sold it for £255m to a management team in 2007. Today he is heavily involved in charity work helping the long-term unemployed. There are around £18m net assets in various Ainscough property companies including Ainscough Investments. After tax, the family should be worth perhaps £210m.
148= £210m Tony Bramall & family
Bramall Properties
After qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1960, Bramall managed a Sheffield finance company. But in 1963 he joined his father’s Sheffield-based car dealer, later taking over the reins. The company was floated in 1978 and nine years later Bramall agreed his first takeover by Avis, collecting £45m for the family stake. But retirement did not beckon then and in 1990 Bramall put £1.5m into his second car venture called CD Bramall. In 2004 he sold the Harrogate-based operation to the much larger Pendragon in a £230m takeover, netting £76m for his stake. But he spent £56m in 2006 acquiring a stake in the quoted Lookers dealership. That stake is now worth £102m. There are two family companies, Bramall Properties and Winterquay, with £47m net assets in 2013. The Bramall family should be worth £210m after tax.
148= £210m Rashid & Aziz Tayub & family
Crown Crest (Holdings)
The Leicester-based Crown Crest property and distribution operation was started in 1977 by the Tayub family in a small corner shop after leaving Malawi. Crown Crest ran its offices, distribution hub and a cash and carry business from Cobden Street, in Belgrave, Leicester, for about 13 years. But the company has now closed the cash and carry and relocated about half a dozen jobs to its new £36m site in Kirby Muxloe. Other Crown Crest sites have been identified for potential housing developments. Three separate Tayub companies including Crown Crest (Leicester) made a total of £18.3m profit on £350m sales in 2012-13. With £137m net assets, they are worth £180m. Collectively we value the family, led by Rashid and Aziz, at £210m with other assets.
151= £205m Eric Gadsden
WE Black
Swifts nearly scuppered plans by WE Black in the summer to develop a former Royal Mail building in Princes Risborough. The Chesham-based company was given planning permission to knock down the former delivery office in Bell Street and build a two-storey building with five flats on the first floor and a Morrisons Local on the ground floor. But demolition, which was due to take place on May 22, was stopped, when police were called to delay the proceedings because they were told swifts were present. But no swifts were present according to Eric Gadsden, WE Black’s boss and owner. He had the firm’s environmentalist check the building and the demolition went ahead despite protests. Gadsden said: “We haven’t killed these swifts. They have not been murdered. They have gone. If they are not nesting there, they are presumably nesting at another site, aren’t they?” WE Black itself made a record £16.7m profit on £31.39m sales in 2013. It is worth its £143.1m net assets. There are another £41m of net assets in Three Rivers Property Investments and Gadsden has a £14m stake in the quoted Michelmersh Brick business. With his racing interests added, Gadsden should be worth at least £205m.
151= £205m Tony Pidgley
Berkeley
Surrey-based housebuilder Berkeley Group recently signed a £700m joint venture with National Grid to build up to 14,000 homes on redundant gasholder sites around London. Yet Berkeley reckons the UK housing market has reverted to normal transactions levels from the high point in 2013, while demand for its homes has continued. In June, the FTSE 250 company posted a £380m profit for 2013-14 (up from £270.7m a year earlier) while revenues rose 18% to £1.62bn. Land currently held in the pipeline consisted of more than 11,000 plots. In addition, the group said new planning consents at London Dock in Wapping, E98, and a site in Chiswick during the period had further enhanced the quality of the land bank held unconditionally. As chairman, Tony Pidgley now has a stake worth £153m. A bonus scheme that could pay out £75m worth of shares. Past share sales and hefty dividends take him to £205m for now. Pidgley , a former Barnado’s boy, likes his work so much that he recently bought one of his own luxury flats for £10.5m.
153 £203m Joseph Brennan & family
Joseph Brennan Bakeries
Family-owned Joseph Brennan Bakeries, the producer of the famed Brennans Bread, is controlled by the multi-millionaire Brennan family. The £64m operation is Dublin’s biggest bakery. The Brennans, however, retain some substantial property assets worth £130m and have had investments in the Versace shop in London’s Bond Street and the Hamleys building in Regent Street, W1. Other assets take the Brennan family, led by Joseph Brennan, to £203m in today’s market.
154= £200m The Astor family
Sableknight
The Astor family’s main asset was the former Times Newspaper headquarters, next to Blackfriars Station, EC4. Working with a partner, the Astor family company Sableknight developed the site into the Thames Court office complex in the late 1990s. Sableknight made a £13.8m profit in 2013 while its net assets rose smartly to £180.4m. In the last eight years Sableknight has paid out £29m in dividends. We value the wider Astor family at £200m.
154= £200m Anthony Brotherton-Ratcliffe & family
Maybrook
The development of the Westway Precinct in Frome town centre is on hold until a large retailer can be found to secure investment. The Somerset development by Maybrook Properties has planning permission but can only move forward with a large developer according to the local paper in the Somerset town. Maybrook is owned by the Brotherton-Ratcliffe family. Its main business is Croudace Homes founded in 1946 by the late wartime RAF hero Jack Brotherton Ratcliffe. It is now chaired by his son Anthony and in 2013 it pushed up profits sharply from £8.1m to nearly £13m on £140m sales. The Caterham-based company showed £97.3m net assets. The other family assets include Croudace Properties Group, Paxton Access and Maybrook Properties, with £82.8m net assets between them in 2013. In all we value the family at £200m.
154= £200m Charles Gallagher & family
Gallagher Holdings
The Dublin-based Abbey housebuilding group is now valued at £185m, with the Irish housing market showing signs of life again. The business is run and controlled by the Gallagher family led by Charles Gallagher. The company – quoted on the London and Dublin stock markets, was built up by Gallagher’s late father, also Charles, who was one of seven brothers from Co Sligo. Most of the brothers emigrated to the UK in the 1930s and 1940s and gradually worked their way up through the ranks of the UK building industry. Some of the Gallaghers returned to Ireland in the 1950s and set up their own house-building company, Abbey. The company was floated on the Irish Stock Exchange in 1974, at the tail end of the 1960s-and-early-1970s housing boom. Charles Gallagher senior was the company’s chief executive when it first went public, but he was soon forced out by other family members. He returned to the UK and spent most of the following decade quietly developing his own house building company, Matthew Homes. But he returned to the helm of Abbey in 1983 and successfully fought off a takeover bid from a British company. Abbey then prospered on the back of the Tory housing boom in the 1980s. Charles Gallagher junior joined the board in 1986 and took over the chairmanship when his father died in 1993. The Gallagher family stake in Abbey is now worth £136m. The family’s other main operation is Matthew Homes, based in St Albans, which showed nearly £69m net assets in 2013. Gallagher Holdings, also showed over £69m net assets in 2012-13. With some overlap of shareholdings, the Gallagher family should still be worth £200m with other assets.
154= £200m Irvine & James Sellar
Sellar Properties
Irvine Sellar’s plans to build a new 26-storey tower of luxury flats next to the Shard, SE1, have been approved by Southwark planners. The Renzo Piano-designed scheme includes the demolition of Fielden House, SE1, to make way for 148 new flats and 19,000 sq ft of shops. Affordable housing will be built off-site under the proposals, with Sellar pledging to provide more than 50 affordable houses at the former Wood Dene Estate in Peckham, reflecting a contribution of 35%. Meanwhile the Shard London Bridge, Europe’s tallest mixed-use building, also designed by Renzo Piano, soars 1,017ft above London Bridge Station and it is now a major London landmark. Sellar spent 13 years nurturing the project through planning committees, public inquiries and funding negotiations. The Qatari government owns 95% of the equity after rescuing the project in 2008. Sellar owns 5% of the equity, 20% of the management company and holds a ‘carried interest’ share of profits above a certain level. The Qataris and Sellar will make up to £1bn on the deal. The 72-storey tower needs to fill up with office tenants with flats available too. Prospects have been boosted by the deal that really matters: the letting of 428,000 sq ft to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp at a headline rent of around £50 per sq ft. This summer The Times, Sunday Times, The Sun, Dow Jones and publisher Harper Collins moved into The Place, SE1, a 16-storey block adjacent to the Shard. Both buildings are part of London Bridge Quarter – which will also include the new residential tower. In 2013 his Sellar Property Group has formed a $1bn (£0.6bn) joint venture with US fund manager HIG Bayside to invest in UK and European commercial property. Sellar is understood to be providing real estate expertise, since HIG Bayside does not have any specialisation in the asset class. The 50:50 joint venture will be seeded with assets raised by HIG Bayside for an opportunistic European property fund. The family property business has a further 1m sq ft of London schemes in the pipeline. In addition Sellar Property group continues to hold a £500m property investment portfolio. In all Sellar and his son James are now worth £200m but will get much richer.
154= £200m Dave Whelan & family
Huron Properties
Manchester city council passed plans submitted by JJB Sports founder Dave Whelan’s Huron Properties in May for the office-to-residential conversion of 8 King Street into 21 apartments. HOW Planning submitted the application on behalf of Huron Properties, the owner of the Grade II listed building which sits within the St Ann’s Square Conservation Area. The approval will allow a major refurbishment of the 7,700 sq ft building to include the conversion of the upper floors from offices into 21 apartments comprising seven one-bed and 14 two-bed flats. This will have cheered Whelan whose delight a year earlier when his club Wigan won the FA Cup against Manchester City turned to despair a week later with Wigan’s relegation from the Premiership. Wigan remains in the championship in the relegation zone, with Whelan himself in hot water. Whelan’s own football career was effectively ended with a broken leg at the 1960 FA Cup Final. Whelan built the JJB sports retailer, making £190m in its 2007 sale. He bought Wigan in 1995, spending £25m on its new DW Stadium. In 2011 he converted loans to shares, and in effect wrote off £48m he had put into the club. Wigan Athletic made a £2.8m loss in 2012-13 but it still had net assets of over £73.2m. His Dave Whelan Sports, parent of a fitness chain, is worth £70m on the back of £5.6m profit in 2012-13. Other smaller assets add £10m while the sale of his Poole’s pie operation netted £5m. After tax, Whelan should now be worth £200m.
159 £198m Charles Kenny & family
Clancourt
Charles Kenny’s Clancourt Group secured law firm Arthur Cox as a tenant for a planned nine-storey Earlsfort Terrace office development in central Dublin early in 2014. The deal is by far the largest prelet tenancy agreement since 2007. Arthur Cox will take 120,000 sq ft at the new 260,000 sq ft development on the corner of Hatch Street and Earlsfort Terrace. The law firm plans to move into the new office in 2017, accommodating its 600 Dublin staff under one roof. The large preletting of such a high-profile development is another fillip for the resurgent Dublin commercial property market, and a coup for Clancourt. In late February, Ballack, a Clancourt subsidiary, applied for an extension of its planning permission there. The permission first granted in September 2009 is for a nine-storey office block over two-storey basement car park. An existing five-storey, early 1980s office block will be demolished. The project will also include restoring a row of four Victorian houses, and retaining the Maltese embassy within the site, In 2008, when Ballack lodged its application, the development was valued at €200m (£160m). Property prices have since halved. Kenny shrewdly stayed out of the overheated Irish property market during the boom years, aside from developing the former Dunlop Centre on Hatch Street into an office block that secured Aviva and Barclays’ as tenants. Other Clancourt assets include Crescent Shopping Centre in Limerick and the Harcourt Centre office blocks in Dublin. Clancourt was set up by Kenny, who began his career in insurance broking before moving into property development. It sold Parkway Shopping Centre in Limerick for more than €56m in 2006 and developed the Atlantic Coast Hotel in Mayo. Kenny has been developing and managing prime office buildings in Dublin since the 1960s. With other assets, we value the Kenny family at £198m.
160 £196m The Duke of Buccleuch & family
Buccleuch Estates
Buccleuch Property offloaded three industrial assets for a total consideration of £7.7m in October. This followed two disposals netting nearly £7.5m earlier in 2014. The property firm, part of the Buccleuch Group, took advantage of the strong demand and the funds will be reinvested in new areas. The parent company, Buccleuch Estates, made a £573,000 loss on £30.9m sales in 2013, with net assets rising slightly to £113.5m. Buccleuch, the 10th Duke, inherited his title and assets from his father in 2007. The immensely popular ninth Duke, Europe’s largest landowner, left £320m in his will. The art treasures and antique furniture were valued in the will at £224m. But we cut that back to £150m, taking into account any likely tax bill. The family’s land is not valuable, but diversification into property takes Buccleuch to £196m.
161 £190m Alan Murphy
Nikal Investments
Property group Nikal was formed in 2003 with a focus on developing brownfield sites. Its biggest development has been Masshouse in Birmingham, a joint venture with the Royal Bank of Scotland. The aim
of the £330m scheme has been to create a new city centre community. Alan Murphy is one of the principle backers of Manchester-based Nikal. His wealth came first from the sale of a supermarket and then in 1982 he started AM Paper, which turned big reels of tissue into toilet rolls. In 1997, Murphy sold part of his stake for £100m and two years later the rest for £50m. Other assets and property deals through Nikal take Murphy to £190m.
162= £180m Terence Cole
Marcol
London-based Marcol is planning to invest £100m in UK property to establish a new business providing care for patients recovering from operations. With a partner, it had built a similar venture in Germany: Median Kliniken, which was sold recently for around £790m. Marcol has interests in many sectors, including care homes, hospitals, hotels, industrial, leisure, offices, residential and retail, with a combined portfolio value of around €3bn (£2.4bn). The business was started in 1976 by property entrepreneurs Cole and his business partner Mark Steinberg (qv). The pair have more than 400 directorships between them. The largest company we can now see is Chelsea Harbour with £106m net assets in 2012-13. Cole’s other assets take him to a conservative £180m.
162= £180m Sir John Ritblat & family
Delancey
Property veteran Ritblat is involved in education through the Alpha Plus operation with schools around Britain. Ritblat chaired property giant British Land from 1970 to 2006, selling most of his stake for £57m. He joined forces with his younger son, Jamie, to spearhead a £2.6bn property investment fund. We can see more than £9m profit for 2012-13 in two Ritblat companies including fast-growing Creditincome. The Ritblats should now be worth £180m.
162= £180m Mark Steinberg
Marcol
Steinberg co-founded London property company Marcol with partner Terence Cole. Set up in 1976 it has a portfolio, mainly in Europe, worth around €3bn (£2.4bn). Steinberg and Cole have more than 400 directorships between them. The biggest is Chelsea Harbour, with £106m net assets in 2012-13. Steinberg’s other assets take him to a conservative £180m.
168 £172m David Pearl
Structadene
London property entrepreneur and keen cyclist David Pearl has been selling assets of late to cut debt at his Structadene operation. Early in 2013 he reckoned to be 80% through his five-year plan for the company and says he no longer has any emotional attachment to buildings. In this vein he sold an East End building to the Royal College of Psychiatrists for £10m in January 2013. Pearl left school at 15 and spent four years packing cardigans into boxes to earn his living. He switched to property on the advice of an estate agent friend, and after two days decided he liked the business. In 1965, he went into property managing flats and factories and never looked back. In 2013 Structadene’s profits came in at £24.8m on £64.2m turnover. It is worth its near £168m net assets. We add £4m to the philanthropic Pearl – blue plaques and St Paul’s Cathedral are among his interests – for other assets.
169= £170m Sir Euan Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe & family
Calthorpe Estates
Calthorpe Estates is creating a thriving retail and leisure location in the heart of leafy Edgbaston. The £350m development programme covers the 150 acres owned by the company. The development boasts a mixture of high-quality retail, leisure, gastro, prime residential and commercial space. There is a strong commercial quarter, which includes more than 3m sq ft of commercial office space. The parent company Calthorpe Property Company showed £6.1m net assets in 2013-14. Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe inherited the estate in 1985. His trusts made
around £40m profit in 1999 by selling off 300 acres in Hampshire, leaving the family with 4,000 acres there. Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe also has £10m of other company assets plus interests in America, the Gulf and Europe. Rising land prices push him to £170m.
169= £170m John Berkley & family
Berkeley Leisure
Berkley chairs Berkeley Leisure, a Somerset-based mobile home operator and property developer. In 2013 it made £8.3m profit on £22.3m sales. Largely family owned, the company has nearly £85.5m net assets but the annual report states that they are worth around £100m more than the book value. The Berkley family is worth £170m with other assets.
169= £170m David Coffer
St James Capital
An ace property dealmaker for 40 years, Coffer sold the first 50% of the Earls Court, SW5, and Olympia, W14, exhibition centres with Anthony Lyons (qv) in a £280m deal back in 2007. The remaining 50% stake was sold in 2010. We can see eight companies with £35m net assets in total where he has stakes. His personal assets were valued at £80m at the market peak. He should still be worth £170m.
172 £166m Michael & Robert Slowe & family
J Leon
The Slowe cousins, Michael and Robert, are directors of J Leon, a London-based property operation. Investment grade property accounts for more than a third of its balance sheet. High street shops in prime locations make up three quarters of the group’s property portfolio. The company also has a portfolio of central London residential properties. In 2012-13, it made a £2.1m profit on £4.9m sales. We value the business and the wider Slowe family on the near £166m net asset figure.
173= £162m Rodger Dudding
Lonsto International
Rodger Dudding is the king of lugs in Britain – or lock up garages with around 12,000 of them. In total they have recently been valued at over £120m. The former naval engineer also owns several hundred retail units, more than 700 flats and a range of commercial mews properties, all contributing to a property portfolio which makes up 70% of his fortune. The rest comes from his classic car collection of around 200 cars, which have shot up in value in recent years, taking Dudding to £162m easily.
173= £162m Brian Scowcroft & family
Kingmoor Park Properties
With an economics degree from Manchester University, and subsequent accountancy qualifications, Brian Scowcroft had a choice to make – join a big accountancy practice, or enter the family firm – Swinton Insurance – founded by his father in 1957. From finance director, Scowcroft became joint chief executive in 1985. The family started selling stakes in the firm to Sun Alliance in 1988. By the early 1990s the Scowcroft family had made around £150m from the sale before tax. Scowcroft went into industrial property development as he had the capital to acquire the land cheaply. Scowcroft’s Kingmoor Park Properties operation near Carlisle saw its net assets rise in 2012-13 to £25m. His Alard Properties has also built a £100m portfolio and has a development pipeline in excess of 500,000 sq ft of both residential and commercial development space. We can see £29m net assets in family companies. The family is worth £162m after tax.
175= £160m Tom Cross
Parkmead
Tom Cross was the chief executive at Aberdeen-based Dana Petroleum. His career has seen him move from Conoco, Thompson North Sea and Louisiana Land and Exploration, before joining the UK’s Petroleum Science and Technology Institute in 1990 as director of engineering. He joined Dana’s board and in 1995 was promoted to chief executive officer. In 2010 Korea National Oil Corporation took over the company in a hostile £1.87bn takeover which valued Cross’s stake and options at over £57m. London-born Cross trained as an engineer at Exeter University and now lives and works in Aberdeen. Cross made £57m when he sold in the Dana sale. Cross also has a near £33m stake in the quoted Parkmead oil operation which he chairs. Major land/property interests take Cross to £160m.
175= £160m Dr Nick Dhandsa & family
ANS
Starting his career as a hospital doctor, Dr Nick Dhandsa put together his first nursing home deal in Bognor Regis in 1982. He went on to build Associated Nursing Services which floated on the AIM in the late 1980s but was later taken private in 2000 for £29m. His brother, Surindar Dhandsa, was marketing and development director. In late 2003, a new company was formed to take over ANS. The Dhandsas had 38% of the new company, ANS 2003, which bought the old assets for £124m. Two years later, the business was sold to BUPA in a £330m deal, including £120m of debt. The Dhandsa family picked up around £100m from that deal. Since then Dhandsa has been actively investing in property and made a 300% return on investments in Dubai over three years. He has also invested heavily in UK golf courses, a West London Clinic, a restaurant and property in Romania and the Ukraine. He is also starting to look for deals in India. On the financial front, Dhandsa has formed a business to invest in early stage hedge funds with an old friend, Tushar Patel. The Dhandsa family should now be worth £160m.
175= £160m Simon Karimzadeh & family
Eskar International
In 2006,Karimzadeh snapped up a £1.13bn European property portfolio sold by a Swiss hedge fund. More than 40 years ago, Karimzadeh’s late father started Eskar International, a London-based property trading-to-processing group. Eskar showed £286m net assets in its 2013 accounts, but we cautiously value it at £150m, adding £10m for other assets to the Karimzadeh family.
175= £160m Sir John Mactaggart & family
Mactaggart Heritable Holdings
Mactaggart Heritable, the
Glasgow-based property group, trades as the Western Heritable Investment Company. It can trace its roots back to Sir John Mactaggart’s great-grandfather, also Sir John, who started building tenements in Springburn, Glasgow, in 1898. Over the next few years he built more than 2,000 middle-class homes in the south and west of the city. The first Sir John was an active Labour man and was treasurer of the first branch of the Labour party under Kier Hardy. Today Mactaggart Heritable owns a string of high-priced commercial properties mostly in London and Manhattan. It is worth its net assets which hit nearly £149m in 2013. We add £11m for past dividends etc to Mactaggart and his family.
175= £160m Dominic Silvester
Secure Income REIT
Dominic Silvester is a leading shareholder in Secure Income REIT. Floated in the summer on the AIM by entrepreneurs Nick Leslau and Sir Tom Hunter, the shares of Secure Income REIT have soared, valuing the long-term property investor at nearly £476m. Silvester has a £30m stake. A former auditor in Bermuda, Irish-born Silvester started an insurance business there. In 2001 his business merged with another group called Enstar. Silvester runs the enlarged group renamed Enstar and retains a near £68m stake in the Nasdaq-quoted operation. Share sales since 2009 total £58.5m. Other assets including a stake in the Saracens rugby club, should take Silvester to £160m easily after allowing for reinvestment.
180 £157m Stuart Monk & family
Jomast
Stockton-based Jomast reckons to be one of the UK’s leading property development, investment and regeneration specialists with commercial and residential real estate assets in excess of £250m. It saw its profits soar to £10.4m on £18.3m sales in 2012-13. The company, headed and owned by Stuart Monk, has just drawn up plans for a housing development in the village of Kirklevington, just outside Yarm. Jomast said key aspects of the existing village, including the Grade II listed Church of St Martin, would be protected, while a new village centre would be created, providing a “much-needed” facility for the school, church and wider community. The outline plans include housing, a new village centre, landscaped green and a public square, which will include tennis courts, a cricket pitch, children’s play area, walks and local transport connections. Jomast expects to submit a planning application in early 2015, subject to the outcome of a public consultation event. In all Jomast has net assets of nearly £154m. We add £3m for other assets to Monk.
181 £155m Simon Clarke & family
St Modwen
Birmingham-based St Modwen has started work on the second phase of its £1bn regeneration of Longbridge with the second phase of the £70m town centre revamp. Work has started on a new Marks & Spencer superstore, which is due to open Christmas 2015. Planning permission has also been granted for a further 45,000 sq ft of retail, restaurant and café space and a new multi-storey car park. St Modwen was co-founded by Sir Stan Clarke, who died in 2004 leaving £138.9m in his will. An ex-plumber, Clarke started the Clarke Securities construction operation, selling it for £51m in 1987. He kept the property side, which became St Modwen. Son Simon sits on the St Modwen board looking after the £79m family stake. The Clarkes also had a 56% stake in Northern Racing operation until its £66m sale in 2007. Other assets and a share sale in April 2014 take the family to £155m after tax.
182 £154m Sir Richard Sutton & family
Sir Richard Sutton’s Settled Estates
Profits at Sir Richard Sutton’s Settled Estates fell to £7.6m on a £16m turnover in 2012-13. Sutton inherited the title from his father in 1981 and runs the property-to-farming group. The Suttons have valuable acreage in Lincolnshire, London, the West Country and the United States. The estate’s net assets rose to £146.3m. Other assets take the Dorset-based Sutton family to £154m.
183= £150m Robert Carter & family
Bullen Investments
Norwich-based construction group RG Carter was awarded a contract in September to construct a new care village located on the Bowthorpe Three Score housing development site to the west of Norwich. The project, due for completion in March 2016, comprises 80 dementia care apartments and 92 housing-with-care flats. RG Carter itself made £5.1m profit on £261.4m sales in 2014. Robert Carter, as chairman, joined the family-owned business in 1972. It is worth its £105m net assets, and we add £45m for the net assets in the separate Bullen Investments property business.
183= £150m Heinrich Feldman & family
Inremco 26
Prince Charles likened One Poultry, EC2, to a “’30s wireless set”. The candy-striped triangular block above Bank tube was sold by its little-known owner, Heinrich Feldman, in early 2014 to a private equity group for around £110m. The “wireless” generates rent of £6.3m a year for Feldman. A low-key London property man, Feldman’s main holding company, Inremco 26, made £3.5m profit and showed £107.12m net assets in 2012-13. The One Poultry sale should take him to £150m.
183= £150m Lord Foster
Foster Holdings
Lord Foster-designed flats at the former Battersea power station site have recently gone on sale. Foster & Partners is also front-runner in the race to design and head up the consultancy team for all 46 stations on the proposed new Jeddah Metro project. The £7.2bn rail scheme, which includes three new lines, is part of the city’s wider transport programme. One of the world’s great architects, Foster set up his own practice in 1967 which later became Foster & Partners. Foster had an 85% stake until he sold 40% in 2007, valuing the company at around £300m. Foster should have received around £120m. Foster & Partners made £31.4m profit on £149.3m turnover in 2013-14, when its net assets hit £246.3m. He paid £14.7m in 2011 for a holiday home on Martha’s Vineyard and also has homes in London, France and Switzerland, his main home. He should be due a big pay-out in 2017 from loans he made to the company, but we value Foster at £170m now.
83= £150m Bill, Tim & Pollyanna Gredley
Unex Corporation
Plans were unveiled in September for a care home on the site of Queensbury Lodge on Newmarket High Street. Unex, the owner of the site at the top of the high street, have released plans which would see the much-maligned old racing yard turned into an old people’s home. The move came as the local council was preparing to draw up a compulsory purchase order for the site. Newmarket-based Unex Group was started by Bill Gredley, who is best known in racing circles as the owner of User Friendly, which won both the Oaks and St Leger. Unex is now largely owned by Gredley’s children, international showjumper Tim and his sister Pollyanna. Tim has now largely retired from show jumping and is working as managing director of the family’s property company, expanding its operations in America. Unex made £2.3m profit in 2012-13 and is worth its £139.5m net assets. We add more than £10m for other assets to the Gredley family.
183= £150m Michael Hunt & family
Zanlia
Michael Hunt made his fortune building Nissan UK into one of Britain’s most successful car dealers by the late 1980s. Hunt had a 13% stake before the whole operation unravelled. But he has a large property portfolio. There are 11 companies with more than £32m net assets, owned or part-owned by the Hunt family, which should be worth £150m.
183= £150m Gerard O’Hare
O’Hare Developments
Newry entrepreneur O’Hare owns the
local Quays complex, through his Parker Green Group. It has a portfolio that extends from Connecticut to Bratislava and includes the Fairgreen Shopping Centre in Carlow and the proposed Crystal West development in Waterford. He boosted his US interests with two investments in the New York commuter belt valued at more than £125m in 2007 and 500 acres of residential building land in New Jersey for £75m. But cautiously we still value him at £150m.
183= £150m Sir Robert Ogden
Ogden Group
Ogden started work on a Yorkshire farm at 15 and later went into quarrying, site clearance and demolition. He moved into property and was an early investor in London’s Docklands. Ogden now has a number of companies including Condor Aviation. Ogden Properties and Nevison Properties – with more than £43m net assets between them in 2012-13. But with many other private interests, a £50m yacht and the fine collection of horses Ogden is easily worth £150m. He is a huge benefactor of local charities.
183= £150m Walter Scott
Walter Scott & Partners
A nuclear physicist, Scott has a 26% stake in the profitable Edinburgh jeweller Hamilton & Inches. His real money comes from the Walter Scott & Partners investment operation he set up in 1983. His stake was worth £150m when it was sold in 2007. Scott also owns at least seven houses in exclusive Charlotte Square costing around £35m. He has drawn £50m in salaries and dividends in the last 10 years at his company. A generous donor to worthy causes, Scott should still be worth £150m after tax.
191 £147m Tom Martin & family
Radnor Walk Investments
Set up by the Martin family in 1946, Martin’s Properties is one of London’s quietest, yet most respected, property operations, Based in Chelsea it has developed some landmark buildings there such as Whitelands House & the award winning development of 199-209 King’s Road, which won recognition from the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea. The Martins went into property almost by accident, moving their electrical business from Guildford to Chelsea. The family bought a house in Sydney Street, where they let out rooms. In 1956, a second shop was opened at 33F King’s Road while the family looked for property opportunities to reinvest business profits into. Chartered surveyor Tom Martin is MD at the still family-owned operation. We can see two asset rich property companies – Radnor Walk Investments and Martin’s Properties (Chelsea) – showing net assets of nearly £147m between them in 2013-14. We value the Martin family at that level.
192 £146m Peter & Elizabeth Prowting
Prowting Investments
The Prowting family of property developers, led by Peter Prowting, made £88.5m in 2002 by selling their eponymous housebuilding and construction firms. The Uxbridge-based business had been started by Prowting’s father in 1912. Prowting became chairman in 1955 and later floated the business on the stock market in 1988. The Prowting family pulled off a second lucrative deal in March by selling Banner Homes, a specialist in upmarket properties, to Cala Group in a £200m deal that has swelled the family trust by more than £60m. The family still has Prowting Investments, a property operation with £14.3m net assets in 2012-13. We raise the Prowting family to £146m after tax.
193 £145m Sir Peter Michael
Highcross
Sir Peter Michael founded the Highcross property fund management group in 1982. Today it manages around 19m sq ft of space. Its portfolio was valued at around £900m, of which it recently sold its industrial portfolio for £117.5m. The rest is also up for sale and set to be bought by an American private equity operation. An electronics engineer, Michael sold his Quantel special effects operation in 1988 netting £60m. He later made more than £20m from building Classic FM and established the highly regarded Peter Michael Winery in California. He is best known today for his Vineyard at Stockcross hotel near Newbury. Michael’s parent company, Stockford, made a £13.2m loss on £38m sales in 2013 when it showed nearly £28m net assets. In all, Michael’s interests and share sales be worth £145m.
194 £140m Anton Bilton & family
Raven Russia
Bilton’s investment in Russian property is holding its own and the stake he has built in Raven Russia is now worth £77m. Bilton is the grandson of the late Percy Bilton, whose company was taken over in 1998 for £270m. The Bilton family’s stake was worth £79.4m. In all, the Bilton family should still be worth £140m.
195 £137m Robert & Pauline Tan
IGB Corp
Malaysian property tycoon Robert Tan is working on new plans for a £500m development on a long dormant London South Bank site at 20 Blackfriars Road, SE1. In June 2014 a joint venture called Black Pearl, where Tan’s IGB Corporation is a 50% shareholder, bought the site from an Israeli investor. Under the terms of the complex deal, Black Pearl bought out the share capital in Blackfriars – the Guernsey-registered vehicle controlled by the Israeli investor – for £1. Black Pearl also paid off a £65m loan owed to Ireland’s National Asset Management Agency and has assumed a £49m loan. There is an existing consent for a Wilkinson Eyre-designed 42-storey, 243-flat tower and a 277,400 sq ft, 23-storey office tower on the site. Tan built IGB Corp from the small property developer he inherited into one of Malaysia’s largest landlords. Its portfolio includes Malaysia’s largest mall, in Mid-Valley City, and the Gardens Mall. It has also expanded overseas and has hotel interests. Tan shares the family fortune of £137m with his sister Pauline.
196= £135m Dr Philip & Patricia Brown
Crown Manor
An ex-Daily Express science reporter, Brown launched Richmond-based PJB Publications in 1976 providing market research for the bioscience industries. In 2003, Brown and his wife Patricia sold PJB in a £150m deal. Today they own seven property to publishing companies with over £48m of net assets in 2012-13. After tax and reinvestment, they should be worth £135m.
196= £135m Robert Jelley & family
Jelson
Leicester housebuilder Jelson made a £4.1m profit on £72.4m sales in 2013-14. Dating back to 1889, it is owned by MD Robert Jelley and his family, and is worth its £117.1m net assets. Three other family property operations, East Goscote Estates, Nanpantan Properties and J Jelley, have nearly £15m of net assets in total. Other wealth should take assets to £135m.
198 £133m Peter Horton & family
Hortons’ Estates
Hortons’ Estate is planning to invest £10m in the restoration of Birmingham’s historic Grand Hotel to its former glory. Painstaking work will be done to restore the listed façade while a new roof is being craned in to replace the wooden structure that dates back to when the original building was built in 1875. A luxury hotel with 164 rooms and eight new suites will emerge within the city centre landmark. The family-owned Hortons Estate was founded by Isaac Horton, a farmer and butcher and incorporated in 1892. The Birmingham-based property company made £6.3m profit on £14.3m sales in the year to September 2013, when its showed nearly £109m net assets. It manages a portfolio valued at £200m. We value the company though, on the net assets, adding £24m for other assets to the family led by Peter Horton who is deputy chairman.
199 £132m Bruce Mickel & family
Mactaggart & Mickel
Mactaggart & Mickel, the Glasgow house builder, saw its profit rise to £2.4m on £55.5m sales in 2012-13. Started in Victorian times, the firm should be worth its near £132m net assets. The company has identified a number of sites within its land portfolio which have retail/mixed use potential. In addition the company has a few commercial premises. These will be retained and the aim is to become a niche, well-respected commercial property company that is seeking to grow over the next five-10 years with particular emphasis on Scotland. Bruce Mickel chairs the business, which was founded by his grandfather. A third generation family member, he joined the company as a qualified architect in 1970. He is here representing the wider family.
200= £130m Ranjit Boparan & family
Amber Real Estate Investments
Ranjit Boparan started work in a butcher’s shop aged 11 and left school at 16. He set up his West Midlands-based 2 Sisters operation in 1993. Known as “the Chicken King,” his empire now includes ready meals, pizzas, frozen vegetables and biscuits. But weighed down by £587.6m net debt and the impact of the horsemeat scandal on the food sector, it is having to shed jobs after making a £33.5m loss on £2.9bn sales in 2012-13. In the third quarter of 2013-14, it turned in a £28.6m loss though sales were up to more than £811m, with protein products doing particularly well with an 18% rise. Until the outlook becomes clearer, we do not count 2 Sisters in a Boparan family valuation. But past dividends and the £119.2m net assets of their Amber Real Estate Investments property operation in 2012 take Boparan and family to £130m.
200= £130m Demi Chervak & family
High Point Estates
Harrogate-based High Point Estates showed £56.6m net assets in 2012-13. There are another £28.87m net assets in five further Chervak companies such as High Point (Bury). The Chervaks have been busy in recent years on high end (residential) developments in London. Their recent developments, sales and other assets take the family to £130m.
200= £130m Peter Dawson & family
Consolidated Property Wilmslow
Dawson runs Cheshire developer Consolidated Property Wilmslow, which had £60m net assets in 2012-13. A second property operation called Gemsupa – owned by a Dawson family trust – showed over £72m net assets. In all we still value the Dawson family at £130m with other assets.
200= £130m Eric Grove
Catesby Property Group
Solihull council recently granted planning permission to Eric Grove’s Catesby operation for 130 new homes at Dickens Heath. The son of a West Midlands blacksmith, Grove started Canberra, a Midlands housebuilder in 1968, and sold it in 1988 netting around £40m. He has become a property developer via Catesby, worth £40m on the back of £6.2m profit in 2012-13. Other wealth takes Grove to £130m.
200= £130m Sir Jack Hayward
Wend Investments
Born near Molineux, Sir Jack Hayward bought the Wolves in 1991 for £2.1m, spent over £50m on the club until he handed over to Steve Morgan in 2007 for £10. Hayward settled in the Bahamas in 1956, later using the £26m proceeds from the 1972 sale of a family business to develop Freeport. In 2010, he sold his 50% stake for around £80m in the Grand Bahama Port Authority. Energy group SSE recently agreed to buy and invest £200m in a controversial Highlands wind farm project on Hayward’s 13,000-acre Highland estate. Other assets and property should keep Hayward at £130m.
200= £130m Sir Martin Laing & family
Eskmuir Properties
Sir Martin Laing was the last family chairman of the John Laing construction business. Founded in 1848, John Laing is now owned by a private equity owner having agreed to a £1bn takeover in late 2006. Laing family trusts own the separate Eskmuir Properties, which was founded in 1990. It has 1.5m sq ft of property assets encompassing retail, office and industrial throughout the UK. Its net assets rose from £95m to £102m in 2013. Some £17.5m of share sales from John Laing and other assets take the wider Laing family to £130m after tax.
200= £130m The Seddon family
Seddon Properties
Construction group Seddon saw its profits fall slightly to £4.6m on higher turnover of £306.5m in 2012. The Cheshire operation is worth its £93m net assets. The separate Seddon Properties is worth its £35m net assets. The Seddon family recently split the businesses but for our purposes we value the wider family at £130m with other assets.
200= £130m Duncan Sinclair & family
Mountview Estates
Mountview Estates, the London-based property company, saw its share price hit an all time high in July 2014. The shares have come back since then but the low-key operation is still valued at over £303m. The company is chaired by accountant Duncan Sinclair and the wider Sinclair family’s stake is now worth around £120m. We add another £10m for the family’s net assets in smaller private companies such as Ossian Investors and Sinclair Estates.
200= £130m Jeff Smith
Proudreed
Jeff Smith chairs AIM, a Hampshire aviation company making aircraft cabins with £53m net assets in 2013 when it made £10.8m profit. Smith’s stake is worth £43m. He also jointly owns the Proudreed property company with Caspar Macdonald-Hall (qv). It had £162.3m net assets in 2012, valuing Smith’s stake at over £81m. It recently took out a £40m loan with the Royal Bank of Scotland to refinance existing debts, underwritten by its strong portfolio. Other assets take Smith to £130m after tax.
209 £128m Sir Tom Farmer
Morston Assets
Sir Tom Farmer is best known in Scotland for owning 90% of Hibs, the leading Edinburgh football team. But fans are pressuring him to hand the club over to them. It is tyres that made Edinburgh-based Farmer his first fortune. He trained as an apprentice in engineering, but left in 1964 to found his own firm which he sold in 1969 for £450,000. He retired to the US, but decided to find a new challenge. Noticing the standards of customer service in the States, he returned to Edinburgh to found the Kwik Fit chain of garages in 1971, later selling the company to Ford in 1999 for £1bn. Farmer netted £78m for his stake. In 2002, Ford sold it to a venture capital group for £330m, Farmer having turned down the opportunity to buy it back. Yet he was savvy enough to retain the freeholds on many Kwik-Fit properties generating £1m a year in rents. Farmer recently sold choice Edinburgh properties for £2.4m. In 2009 he bought a Newcastle business park for a cut price £20.25m. He made around £8.5m by selling a stake in KBC Holdings, a managed office business. He started Farmer Autocare in 2003 as a mini Kwik Fit, an £8m operation. His other companies include Halecrest Investments and Maidencraig Investments with £28m net assets between them (down £4m) in 2012-13. We clip Farmer back to £128m.
210= £125m Bill Archer
Farm Street Capital
Archer, co-founder of the Focus DIY chain, is now involved in the property market, committing £50m through his company Farm Street Capital. Archer remortgaged his home in 1987 to buy six DIY stores. From this Focus emerged. Archer sold stakes over the years picking up around £147m as Focus was taken over. Archer stepped down from the chairmanship in 2007. He should be worth £125m after tax.
210= £125m Robin Clark & family
Taylor Clark
Taylor Clark, the London-based property, farming, hotels and investment group, is planning a development on a site in Glasgow’s International Financial Services District. It also has two 50/50 joint ventures in property in the South West and Scotland. Taylor Clark itself is largely owned by the Clark family led by Robin Clark, the son of a prominent 1960s property developer. The business is worth its £157.2m net assets in 2012-13. The Underwood Trust, a charity, has a 22.5% stake. The Clark family is worth £125m with other assets.
210= £125m Uzi Kattan
Donvand
Uzi Kattan co-founded tour operator Gullivers Travel Associates until its 2004 sale for £570m to an American giant. Kattan, no longer with the business, had a 22% stake and should have netted around £125m for his stake. In 2011 his son spent £28.5m acquiring a New Bond Street property.
210= £125m Roger Wickens & family
Store Property Holdings
Store Property Holdings started developing commercial property in Sussex more than 60 years ago. Today the family-owned business’s operations have grown to cover the ownership, management and development of over 1.5m sq ft of offices, industrial property, retail outlets and residential units. Its portfolio now extends across London and throughout the South East. The Chichester-based operation made £3.9m profit on £10m turnover in 2013-14. Owned by Wickens and his family trusts, it is worth its £118m net assets. Other assets add £7m.
210= £125m Douglas Woolf & family
Romulus Holdings
Romulus Holdings, a Leicester-based property group, is owned by Douglas Woolf and his family trusts. It showed nearly £96m net assets in 2012 when its profits soared to £21.7m on £36.3m sales. It should easily be worth £120m. We add £5m after tax for past salaries and other assets to take the Woolf family to £125m.
215 £122m The Baylis family
JT Baylis
The late Jack Baylis started as a builder in Bristol after the war. In the 1960s, he bought up the land on which the Cribbs Causeway Mall is now built. Backed by the Pru, the centre was opened in 1998. His family company, JT Baylis & Co, made
£5m profit on £9.5m sales in 2012-13 with net assets of nearly £120m. Baylis died in 2005 and left £96.2m in his will. We value the Baylis family at £122m with other assets.
216= £120m Elliott Bernerd
Chelsfield Partners
Property veteran Elliott Bernerd, who has been courageously fighting cancer, co-founded the £1.4bn Chelsfield Partners business in 2005. Bernerd had previously run another Chelsfield operation, which he founded in 1986, floated on the stock market in 1993 and then took private in 2004, pocketing £45m for selling part of his stake. He made another £82m from selling the rest later. He kept the rights to the Chelsfield name. He has hefty investments in Europe so we keep Bernerd at £120m.
216= £120m Sir George Meyrick
Meyrick Estate Management
Meyrick’s Bodorgan Estate on Anglesey ran to 17,000 acres but he also has large tracts of Bournemouth. There are 11 separate family companies including Meyrick Estate Management and Bodorgan Properties, with £2.5m net assets between them. Our sources reckon that the total Meyrick holdings could be worth as high as £250m, but with asset and farmland prices rising strongly, we raise the Meyrick family to a still conservative £120m.
216= £120m Lochlann Quinn
The Merrion Hotel
A chartered accountant, Lochlann Quinn was a partner with Arthur Andersen. He is also a former chairman and director of Allied Irish Banks. He worked in partnership with Martin Naughton to build up the Glen Dimplex electrical appliance manufacturer. But in 2004, Quinn sold his Glen Dimplex stake back to Naughton for around £110m. He has put some of his Glen Dimplex money into an Irish consortium that bought London’s Savoy Hotel, WC2, and other hotels in 2004. They made a tidy profit selling on part of the group in 2005. Quinn’s other assets, including a Bordeaux chateau and property investments in Dublin, should
be worth £120m in the current market.
216= £120m David Roberts & family
Edinburgh House Estates
The son of a Clydeside shipyard worker, Roberts is best known for his David Roberts Art Foundation in London. He has developed an art gallery in a 12,000 sq ft former furniture factory. A property man, Roberts’ company Edinburgh House made a £26.6m loss in 2013, when its net assets fell sharply to just £14m. His art collection and other property assets, including a growing German business with 140 properties, and €62m (£49.5m) income take Roberts to £120m.
216= £120m Andrew Rosenfeld
Air Capital
Andrew Rosenfeld, a London-based property entrepreneur, has donated £663,000 to Labour since Ed Miliband became leader in 2010. He has also promised another £1m before the next election. Rosenfeld built up the Minerva property group with Sir David Garrard, and later moved to Switzerland in 2006 saying he had £100m to invest having sold “all his and his family’s UK interests.” He returned to Britain in 2011, having sold his Swiss house for a reputed £30m. He now runs his Air Capital property investment operation. After his charity work and political donations, Rosenfeld should be worth £120m.
216= £120m The Duke of Roxburghe
Sunlaws Development Company
The opening session of Book 1 of the Tattersalls October Yearling Sale in October netted the Duke of Roxburghe a tidy sum for one of his horses. A son of Oasis Dream from his Floors Stud topped trade when selling to Sheikh Mohammed’s bloodstock adviser John Ferguson for 775,000gns. But it is wind power that is set to make Roxburghe a hefty fortune. In June BT unveiled a £300m deal over 20 years to buy enough renewable energy to match all of its power consumption north of the border. The company is to take half of the electricity generated by the 48-turbine Fallago Rig wind farm, built in 2012 on land in the Lammermuir Hills owned by Roxburghe. He is also moving into housing development and a new golf course, while he plans to turn his Roxburghe Hotel into a five-star resort. Roxburghe, the 10th Duke, inherited 65,500 acres and Floors Castle in 1974. His two main companies Sunlaws Development and Floors Energy showed £1.7m net assets in 2012-13. With land prices rising and the BT wind farm deal, we raise Roxburghe to £120m.
216= £120m Gerard Versteegh & family
Gerard Versteegh Holdings
Versteegh, a Swedish property man is based in London. There is little wealth in his companies now but a company called Gestrix had £119m of net assets in 2006 and paid out £204m in dividends in 2007. It is now dormant while another dissolved Versteegh company – Anglo Scandanavian Estates – showed more than £95m net assets in 2006. we keep the Versteegh family at £120m.
216= £120m Kevin Wheatcroft
Wheatcroft Land
The death of Tom Wheatcroft in 2009 robbed the East Midlands of one of its great entrepreneurs and developers. He revitalised the Castle Donington motor racing track in the 1970s after opening his collection of GP cars to the public in 1973. His son Kevin is now running the business and is investing heavily in Donnington Park. The circuit is the home of Formula E, a new global series for hi-tech electric-powered racing cars, and Wheatcroft has put £2.05m into the £5.7m cost of the series’ HQ at Donnington. Wheatcroft is well known for his huge collection of World War Two tanks and other weapons. He is spending £3m restoring a German E-Boat. We can see nearly £29m net assets of net assets in his main company Wheatcroft & Son. With an increasingly valuable classic car collection, the Wheatcroft family is now worth perhaps £120m.
224 £118m Ken Rohan & family
Airspace Investments
Pre-tax profits at one of Ireland’s best-known property firms, Airspace Investments, rose by 67% to €4.3m (£3.4m) in 2012. The Dublin-based company was led for many years by well-known developer and Cork native, Ken Rohan before he stepped down in 2009 when his son, Jamie, was appointed managing director of the business. Ken Rohan remains a director and majority shareholder in the group. Rohan is involved in the industrial sector, concentrating on the north side of Dublin as well as a range of other interests in Ireland, Britain and Barbados. Rohan also has a strong UK property portfolio. He
worked in the London Stock Exchange before returning to Ireland to join the Rohan Group, which was set up in the 1960s by his brother, John. In all, the Rohan family should be worth £118m in the current climate with other assets and recent dividends.
225 £117m Chris Marshall & family
Marshall Holdings
Marshall Holdings has a commercial development arm set up in 1968 by Chris Marshall. It operates mainly in the north of England. Among its projects coming soon are the Bridestone Shopping Centre in Congleton, Cheshire, a Darlington office scheme and an in-town retail development in Huddersfield. Marshall Holdings itself dates back to 1901 when Marshall’s great grandfather set up a buildings company in Elland outside Leeds. Still based in the area, the company has grown sharply in recent years as Marshall has long been regarded as one of Yorkshire’s canniest property men. Marshall Holdings, made an exceptional £66.9m loss in 2011 as it wrote down the value of its assets sharply. But it
recovered in 2012 with a £1.4m profit and net assets rising to nearly £94m. In 2013
the recovery went further with a £2.75m profit on £73.6m turnover while net assets rose by £11m to £104.7m. Marshall Holdings should now be worth more than £110m. We add more than £7m for other assets.
226= £115m Richard Benyon & family
Englefield Estate
Richard Benyon, a Tory MP and former junior environment minister, oversees the family’s estates, following the death of his father, Sir William Benyon, earlier this year. The 300-year-old Englefield Estate comprises 20,000 acres from Hampshire to Berkshire and Scotland. The family’s Benyon Estate also owns 300 properties in east London. It was part of a consortium that purchased one of the last affordable housing estates for working-class Londoners. The consortium announced plans to increase rents to match the market rate. Following protests by the tenants, Benyon Estate announced that it would sell its stake in the consortium. The family’s Englefield Estate Trust Corporation had just £395,000 net assets in 2012-13. But the estate has been valued at up to £125m. Cautiously we settle for £115m.
226= £115m Frank Burke & family
BDL Group
Galway-born but Home Counties-based Burke sold his £48m turnover BDL construction operation in 2013 to rival Carey Group. His family also owns Cedar Property Holdings, a property company with £54.5m net assets in 2013. We value Burke at £115m.
226= £115m Jonathan Hitchins & family
Robert Hitchins Group
Plans for one of the largest housing developments ever built between Cheltenham and Gloucester were revealed in September with more than 2,000 homes and two primary schools earmarked for a 257-acre site. The proposals come from the Cheltenham-based Robert Hitchins Group, a successful local developer building business parks, new villages and other developments in the South West and
Wales. The company, with £88m net assets in 2012-13, is led by Jonathan Hitchins and owned by family trust. Other assets add £27m.
229 £112m Graham Cartledge & family
Benoy
Benoy, a Newark-based international architect, design and master planning business, has had huge success in locations as far afield as China, Singapore and Abu Dhabi. The business – which has half its 500-strong team in Hong Kong – has been responsible for landmark developments such as Ferrari World, in Abu Dhabi, and is currently on site with 50 projects in China alone. At the same time, its chairman, Graham Cartledge, has acted as a flag-waver for Nottingham’s economy, joining the prime minister on international trade delegations. Cartledge qualified as an architect in 1972 after graduating from Leicester University. He became Benoy chairman in 1992 and led a subsequent £625,000 management buyout of the business. He took the business into the Far East and has operated in China for 10 years. In 2013, its profits soared to £14.7m on £54.8m sales. With a strong balance sheet and £23.4m net assets it should be worth £100m. Cartledge and his family own it all directly or via trusts. Past salaries/dividends add £12m.
230= £110m Danny Desmond
Bride Hall
Danny Desmond’s property career began when he joined surveyors Jackson Stops and Staff. In 1968, he made the switch to property development joining Hunting Gate, a construction and development group. Two years later he became a director and substantial shareholder and, in 1976 at the age of 36, was appointed group managing director. In 1983, Desmond left Hunting Gate Group to form Bride Hall Group, a new company named after his Elizabethan Estate in Hertfordshire. He 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 Estates for £15m. He has since reacquired the Warner stake and owns all of the Bride Hall operation today. It has an enviable track record of delivering top-quality buildings for tenants and institutional investors and has developed some 5m sq ft of commercial space with a capital value well in excess of £1bn. It is currently working on plans to redevelop land at Gipsy Lane, Luton, by building a new supermarket, housing, improved pedestrian links and landscaping near the river at the centre of the site. Bride Hall is working with the landowner, General Motors UK, to deliver the project. With other investments and past profits, including the £70m proceeds in 2012 from the sale of an Edgware Shopping Mall, Desmond is worth £110m.
230= £110m Peter Gadsby
Ark Capital
Gadsby, one of the East Midlands’ top developers, had a close involvement with championship club Derby County until its 2008 £50m takeover. His stake in the Birch property group was sold in 2000 for £40m. His house building interests are thriving with several large planning consents granted amounting to 2,400 plots. His venture capital division has also seen significant uplift taking Gadsby to £110m.
232= £106m David Dunsdon & family
Coldunell
Esher-based property company Coldunell made an £8m loss in 2012-13 and cut the value of its net assets sharply to £76m. The business was run by John Dunsdon until his death in June 2012. He had been one of the shrewdest operators in the property auction market. He began his career attending auctions at the Fur Trade House in London, the birthplace of modern auctions, before they moved to the Connaught Rooms, WC2, in Bloomsbury in the early 1970s. Coldunell had been started by his father in 1959 It is still owned by his family and trusts. We add £30m for other assets to the wider Dunsdon family now led by John’s son David who joined the board after his father’s death.
232= £106m Jack Morris & family
Business Design Centre
The parent company for the London-based Business Design Centre made £7m profit on £16.2m sales in 2012-13. Owned by Morris and his family, it is worth its near £89m net assets. Morris’s late father, Sam, was originally an ‘oyster-opener’ in a City fish restaurant, but later built his business, City Industrial, into a leading shopfitting group round Britain and the world. Sam Morris’s shrewd move came in 1981 when he rescued the old Royal Agricultural Hall in Islington, N1, and turned the huge derelict ‘Aggie’ into the magnificent Business Design Centre at a cost of £12m. The Morris family also owned Earls Court, SW5, and Olympia, W14, which they sold in 2004, making around £25m from the sale after debt had been stripped out. In all, after allowing for tax on that deal, the wider Morris family should be worth £106m.
234= £105m Edelin Davis & family
Broadthorpe
Broadthorpe, the parent company for William Davis, the Loughborough building contractor and property group, made a £7.3m profit on £57m sales in 2012-13. The sale of a plot of land in Leicester to supermarket giant Asda provided £4.6m of that profit. Founded in 1935, it is run by Edelin Davis. More than 90% of the shares are held in a family trust and the rest by the Davis family. Broadthorpe is worth its near £101m net assets. Other assets add £4m.
234= £105 John Marston & family
Marston Properties
The Marston family’s hotel interests were sold in 2006 for £180m. Prior to the hotel’s sale, Marston had bought out several members of his family through a £100m refinancing of the business. His immediate family had about two-thirds of the shares and should have collected £50m. The separate Marston Properties Holdings made £2.1m profit on £4.9m sales in 2012-13 and is worth its near £93m net assets. After tax and reinvestment, the Marston family is worth £105m.
236 £103m Mathias & Miriam Kraus
Pall Mall Investments (London)
The Krauses, Mathias and Miriam, own Pall Mall Investments (London) , a north London-based property group. It made a £1.1m profit on £11.2m sales in 2012-13. We value the business on its near £101m net assets. We add £2m for other assets.
237= £102m Kjell Andenaes
Andbell
Andenaes is a Norwegian property investor through a family company Avantor. Now based in London according to the Norwegian 2013 rich list in Kapital magazine, his wealth is put at £102m after some spectacular property gains in recent years. We agree.
237= £102m Glyn Watkin Jones & family
Watkin Jones
Glyn Watkin Jones is the eighth generation to run the Bangor-based Watkin Jones Group, founded in 1791, and his son Mark is now taking over more responsibility on the board as a ninth-generation family member and managing director. The company has worked on a wide variety of projects nationwide – ranging from homes and student accommodation to
commercial, industrial and mixed-use developments. It recently completed work on a £10m car showroom development on the site of an old Hoover factory at Llandudno Junction that closed in 1992. The Point development will create 100 jobs initially with 2,000 eventually. Watkin Jones made £5m profit on £138m sales in 2013. It is worth its £80m net assets. Smaller companies add another £22m of net assets, taking the family to £102m.
239= £100m Gerald Coates & family
HW Coates
Gerald Coates chairs HW Coates, a Leicestershire-based property, farming and haulage group. In 2013, it made £9.7m profit on £37.8m sales. With £65.6m net assets it is easily worth £95m. Other wealth adds £5m to the Coates family.
239= £100m Dinesh & Tani Dhamija
Copper Beech Group
The Copper Beech Group, with investments in education, ecotourism and real estate is run by Dinesh Dhamija – one of the UK’s leading internet entrepreneurs. He founded Ebookers, Europe’s most successful online travel agency from an Earls Court ‘bucket shop’ in 1980. Cambridge-educated Dinesh and his wife Tani grew Ebookers to employ 2,000 people across 12 countries. In 2005, Dinesh sold Ebookers to the US Cendant company, receiving more than £90m for his stake. He then founded Copper Beech. Dinesh is hugely active in the charity sectors in India, supporting children’s education and medical care and the UK where he is a long-serving trustee of Scope and the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. With other assets the pair are worth £100m.
239= £100m Con Folkes & family
Folkes Investments
Midlands-based Folkes Holdings can trace its history back to 1697, as a blacksmith making chain mail and swords. Now a family-owned property group it had assets of more than £100m until its demerger in 2012. Two separate Folkes companies showed £57m net assets in 2013. In late 2013 Folkes disposed of its property holdings in South Africa for their net asset value. In Britain, an uptick in the second half of 2013 particularly in Folkes’ industrial portfolio pushed the rental income up to £5.9m. Folkes and his family should be worth £100m with other assets.
239= £100m Giles Mackay
Hometrack
A barrister turned property entrepreneur, Mackay has a number of property related interests. He has a string of impressive deals to his name including one for Sainsbury’s that was the first of its kind in Europe. Mackay bought Ford UK’s residential assets for £60m in 1993 and later set up PXS, the largest independent player in the new-development part-exchange market, whereby buyers part exchange their present home to move into a new-build. In 2000, Mackay started Hometrack.com, a property analysis business. In a 2012 court case over a costly London property project, Mackay’s fortune was put at well over £100m.
239= £100m Neil Morgan & family
Morgan Industrial Properties
Electronics engineer Neil Morgan and his brothers own and run Morgan Industrial Properties, a Derbyshire-based property group which made £3.8m profit on £4.2m sales in 2013. The business is easily worth its £46.3m net assets in the current climate. Other businesses include Pektron Group, an electronics group which made £6.5m profit on £39.1m sales in 2013. Pektron is owned by the Morgans and 20% by Morgan Industrial. It takes the family value to £100m.
239= £100m John Muir & family
Muir Group
Fife-based Muir Property Investments was formed in 1977 to meet the demand for high quality business parks, industrial units and commercial developments in Scotland. It is part of the business empire of John Muir, a former joiner and teacher, who went into business in 1973. Muir Property now owns a wide portfolio of industrial and commercial properties for lease, together with a number of sites available for development. To date, the company has developed and retained 270,000 sq ft of industrial units and more than 100,000 sq ft of class four space with existing consents for a further 100,000 sq ft. Its parent Muir Holdings showed over £13m net assets in 2013-14. Muir also has the much larger and separate housebuilder, Muir Group, which turned in a near £4m profit on £73.1m sales in 2013-14. It is worth its near £69m net assets. Past dividends etc take the Muir family to £100m.
239= £100m William Rankin
William Rankin Hanro Group
Hanro Group, the Newcastle-based property operation is well known for its sensitive restoration of historic sites. It has recently been working on two 150-year-old town houses in Newcastle’s historic Grey Street. Hanro was also lauded for its careful £2.5m redevelopment of the Grade II listed Cooper’s Auction Yard building in Newcastle city centre. The 1897 building is a rare surviving example of a purpose-built, multi-storey horse, carriage and motor car repository, close to Newcastle Central Station. This work reflects Hanro’s continued heavy investment in Newcastle’s city centre. The business is chaired by Bill Rankin. While he only has a small stake, many of the shares are held in family trusts. Hanro made £5.8m profit on £9.9m sales in 2013 and with £91.2m net assets, is easily worth £95m. We add another £5m for other assets.
239= £100m The Duke of Richmond & Gordon & family
Goodwood Estate Company
The Goodwood Estate Company made a £616,000 profit on a record £67.2m turnover in 2013, when its net assets came in at £44m. The entrepreneurial Earl of March has done wonders at the 12,000-acre West Sussex estate. Horse racing, vintage car races and other attractions have raised huge revenue. March’s father, the Duke of Richmond & Gordon, succeeded his father to the title in 1992. He is a chartered accountant by training. But with land and art values rising allied to the Goodwood brand, the family asset wealth should now be £100m easily.
239= £100m Mike Walker & family
Walker Holdings (Scotland)/Westerwood
The Walker housebuilding group lifted profits by 50% in 2013 as a recovering market breathed new life into the sector. Founded by chairman Mike Walker more than 40 years ago, the group made a £4.5m profit, up from £3m in 2012 and just £24,000 in 2011. The profit hike was achieved on the back of a 9.1% rise in unit sales, though turnover fell from £24.2m to £19.2m. The group loaned Westerwood, a property company owned by the two family directors, £6m in 2007 and is still owed £2.3m. Walker and his family own Walker Holdings (Scotland) and Westerwood, and have stakes in four others. In total the net assets in those six companies attributable to Walker and his family came in at £95.4m in 2012-13. We add £5m for other assets.
239= £100m Judith & Fergus Wilson
Burwood Property Co
Fergus Wilson and his wife Judith, both former teachers, are better known as the owners of 900 properties in Kent around Ashford. In September it was reported that they are near to selling their property portfolio for £250m with three Chinese investors showing interest. Fergus Wilson also reported further leads from abroad: “The fact is we have had interest from Russia, Japan, Dubai, Kuwait, Germany, the US and Canada.” They met while training as teachers at Goldsmiths College, SE14, in the late ’60s. In the early 1990s the Wilsons were marking maths homework and writing school reports at a Blackheath comprehensive but in 1992 Judith Wilson gave up her job to concentrate on property. Fergus joined her and they came to public attention at the height of the buy-to-let bonanza in 2006. Their empire came close to collapse in the 2008 financial crisis but they survived and are prospering. At a £250m sale price, the Wilsons would need to repay around £40m to £45m to about 14 lenders. After paying tax and disposal fees, the Wilsons hope to walk away with £100m. This should be enough to “pay for fish and chips for the rest of my life,” Fergus Wilson claims. We take him at his word and value the pair at £100m.
239= £100m Woon Wing Yip & family
W Wing Yip & Brothers Property & Investments
Wing Yip arrived in Hull in 1959 with just £10 in his pocket. After waiting and owning a restaurant chain, today he runs a large cash-and-carry operation, W Wing Yip & Brothers, supplying Chinese restaurants. It made £4.6m profit on £96.8m sales in 2013 when its net assets came in at £38.7m net assets. The separate W Wing Yip & Brothers Property & Investments showed £25.1m net assets. It is involved in property development, management and investment, with more than 60 commercial and residential tenants around the country. The two should be worth £90m. Other assets add £10m.
250 £99m Kip Bertram & family
Rysa Lodge Residential Properties
Kip Bertram and his late mother Elsie started Bertram Books in a disused Norwich chicken shed. It became Britain’s largest independent book wholesaler. In 1999, it merged with Cypher, a public library supplier in a £54m deal, valuing the Bertram family stake at £35m. Kip Bertram is no longer in the book trade, having moved into property development, particularly in London and investment in industrial property. As a result the family’s asset wealth is now around £99m.
Alphabetical index
| Name | 2014 rank | Wealth in2014 (£m) | Wealth in 2013 (£m) | Change (£m) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ahluwalia, Sukhpal Singh | 109 | 300 | – | – |
| Ainscough, Bill & family | 130 | 250 | – | – |
| Ainscough, Martin & family | 148 | 210 | 210 | 0 |
| Al-Tajir, Mahdi | 24 | 1,670 | 1,669 | 1 |
| Allen, Bert & Maurice | 123 | 268 | 268 | 0 |
| Andenaes, Kjell | 237 | 102 | 102 | 0 |
| Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, | ||||
| Sir Euan & family | 169 | 170 | 160 | 10 |
| Archer, Bill | 210 | 125 | – | – |
| Astor family | 154 | 200 | 190 | 10 |
| Atkin, Edward & family | 124 | 267 | – | – |
| Baylis family | 215 | 122 | 119 | 3 |
| Beckwith, Sir John & Peter | 92 | 350 | 350 | 0 |
| Bedford, The Duke of | 54 | 660 | 630 | 30 |
| Benyon, Richard & family | 226 | 115 | – | – |
| Berkley, John & family | 169 | 170 | 170 | 0 |
| Bernerd, Elliott | 216 | 120 | 120 | 0 |
| Bertarelli, Ernesto & Kirsty & family | 3 | 9,370 | 7,400 | 1970 |
| Bertram, Kip & family | 250 | 99 | – | – |
| Bhatti, Abdul & family | 130 | 250 | 186 | 64 |
| Bilton, Anton & family | 194 | 140 | 140 | 0 |
| Boparan, Ranjit & family | 200 | 130 | 750 | -620 |
| Boultbee Brooks, Steve & Clive | 118 | 286 | 120 | 166 |
| Bradshaw, Keith & family | 166 | 175 | 145 | 30 |
| Bramall, Terry & family | 83 | 425 | 425 | 0 |
| Bramall, Tony & family | 148 | 210 | 194 | 16 |
| Brennan, Joseph & family | 153 | 203 | 202 | 1 |
| Brotherton-Ratcliffe, Anthony & family | 154 | 200 | 175 | 25 |
| Brown, Dr Philip & Patricia | 196 | 135 | 132 | 3 |
| Buccleuch, The Duke of & family | 160 | 196 | 180 | 16 |
| Burke, Frank & family | 226 | 115 | 105 | 10 |
| Burman, Anand | 12 | 3,015 | – | – |
| Caddick, Paul & Johnny | 166 | 175 | 150 | 25 |
| Cadogan, Earl & family | 10 | 4,200 | 3,725 | 475 |
| Capstick-Dale, Nick | 146 | 215 | 190 | 25 |
| Caring, Richard | 46 | 800 | 700 | 100 |
| Carter, Robert & family | 183 | 150 | 143 | 7 |
| Cartledge, Graham & family | 229 | 112 | – | – |
| Caudwell, John | 26 | 1,500 | 1,500 | 0 |
| Charles, Prince | 51 | 740 | 740 | 0 |
| Chaudhary, Adalat & Arshad | 130 | 250 | 186 | 64 |
| Chen, Vivien & family | 20 | 2,290 | – | – |
| Cheng, Kar-Shun Henry & family | 4 | 9300 | 10,270 | 970 |
| Chervak, Demi & family | 200 | 130 | 86 | 44 |
| Choudrey, Zameer & family | 66 | 525 | 377 | 148 |
| Christodoulou, John | 42 | 858 | 678 | 180 |
| Clare, Mike & family | 128 | 255 | 242 | 7 |
| Clark, Robin & family | 210 | 125 | 124 | 1 |
| Clarke, family | 67 | 500 | 500 | 0 |
| Clarke, Simon & family | 181 | 155 | 120 | 35 |
| Clowes, Charles | 140 | 222 | 202 | 20 |
| Coates, Gerald & Michael & family | 239 | 100 | – | – |
| Coffer, David | 169 | 170 | 170 | 0 |
| Cohen, Michael | 97 | 330 | 300 | 30 |
| Cole, Terence | 162 | 180 | 180 | 0 |
| Conway, Stephen & family | 125 | 260 | – | – |
| Cross, Tom | 175 | 160 | 150 | 10 |
| Davidson, Manny & family | 141 | 220 | 220 | 0 |
| Davis, Edelin & family | 234 | 105 | 100 | 5 |
| Dawson, Peter & family | 200 | 130 | 130 | 0 |
| De Haan, Sir Roger & Peter | 46 | 800 | 800 | 0 |
| Dellal, Guy & Alex & family | 86 | 400 | 300 | 100 |
| Desmond, Danny | 230 | 110 | 100 | 10 |
| Desmond, Dermot | 33 | 1,180 | 1,305 | -125 |
| Desmond, Richard | 32 | 1,200 | 960 | 240 |
| Dhamija, Dinesh & Tani | 239 | 100 | 102 | -2 |
| Dhandsa, Dr Nick & family | 175 | 160 | 160 | 0 |
| Dixon, Mark | 53 | 680 | 757 | 77 |
| Done, Fred & Peter | 38 | 950 | – | – |
| Dorfman, Lloyd | 62 | 550 | 470 | 80 |
| Dudding, Rodger | 173 | 162 | 157 | 5 |
| Dunsdon, David & family | 232 | 106 | 150 | -44 |
| Earl, Robert | 119 | 280 | 270 | 10 |
| Edmiston, Lord | 74 | 472 | 452 | 20 |
| Englander, Eliasz & family | 101 | 320 | 220 | 100 |
| Evans, Roderick & family | 92 | 350 | 350 | 0 |
| Farmer, Sir Tom | 209 | 128 | 132 | -4 |
| Feldman, Heinrich & family | 183 | 150 | 112 | 38 |
| Folkes, Con & family | 239 | 100 | 100 | 0 |
| Foster, Lord | 183 | 150 | 150 | 0 |
| Freshwater, Benzion & family | 31 | 1,290 | 1,150 | 140 |
| Fuller, Simon | 88 | 382 | 375 | 7 |
| Gabbay, David & family | 120 | 275 | 275 | 0 |
| Gadsby, Peter | 230 | 110 | 90 | 20 |
| Gadsden, Eric | 151 | 205 | 167 | 38 |
| Gallagher, Charles & family | 154 | 200 | – | – |
| Gallagher, Tony | 72 | 475 | 410 | 65 |
| Gehlaut, Sameer | 57 | 615 | – | – |
| Gibbor, Iris & family | 116 | 290 | 275 | 15 |
| Glick, Simon | 37 | 1,000 | – | – |
| Gordon, Sir Donald & family | 55 | 650 | 650 | 0 |
| Gorvy, Manfred & family | 95 | 340 | 280 | 60 |
| Gosling, Sir Donald | 79 | 440 | 430 | 10 |
| Gould, Nicholas & Peter | 91 | 355 | 205 | 150 |
| Gredley, Bill & Tim & Pollyanna | 183 | 150 | 125 | 25 |
| Green, Peter & family | 49 | 750 | 725 | 25 |
| Grove, Eric | 200 | 130 | 110 | 20 |
| Guangchang, Guo | 14 | 2,600 | – | – |
| Guthrie, John & family | 125 | 260 | 235 | 25 |
| Hayward, Sir Jack | 200 | 130 | 130 | 0 |
| Healey, Eddie | 39 | 950 | 900 | 50 |
| Hirst, Damien | 146 | 215 | 215 | 215 |
| Hitchins, Jonathan & family | 226 | 115 | 110 | 5 |
| Hobson, Sir Ronald | 69 | 480 | 474 | 6 |
| Hong, Kuok Khoon | 26 | 1,500 | 1,400 | 100 |
| Horton, Peter & family | 198 | 133 | 131 | 2 |
| Howard de Walden, Baroness & family | 17 | 2,580 | 2,364 | 216 |
| Hunt, Jon | 35 | 1,070 | 925 | 145 |
| Hunt, Michael & family | 183 | 150 | 150 | 0 |
| Hyams, Harry | 106 | 312 | 310 | 2 |
| Iliffe, Lord & family | 138 | 235 | 220 | 15 |
| Iveagh, Earl of & Guinness family | 43 | 850 | 850 | 0 |
| Ives, William & family | 97 | 330 | 316 | 14 |
| James, Fawn & India Rose | 76 | 454 | 374 | 80 |
| Jelley, Robert & family | 196 | 135 | 135 | 0 |
| Jianlin, Wang | 6 | 8,740 | 10,400 | -1,660 |
| Jones, Peter & family | 52 | 725 | 717 | 8 |
| Jones, Peter | 72 | 475 | 475 | 0 |
| Kamprad, Jonas | 75 | 470 | – | – |
| Kansagra, Bhupendra & family | 141 | 220 | – | – |
| Karimzadeh, Simon & family | 175 | 160 | 107 | 53 |
| Kassam, Firoz | 130 | 250 | 214 | 36 |
| Kattan, Uzi | 210 | 125 | 125 | 0 |
| Kaye, Adam/Sam/Jonathan & family | 109 | 300 | – | – |
| Kennedy, Brian | 130 | 250 | 250 | 0 |
| Kenny, Charles & family | 159 | 198 | 195 | 3 |
| Kirkland, John & family | 105 | 315 | 300 | 15 |
| Kirschel, Laurence | 101 | 320 | 320 | 0 |
| Kirsh, Nathan | 9 | 5,060 | 3100 | 1,960 |
| Kraus, Mathias & Miriam | 236 | 103 | 96 | 7 |
| Krishnan, Ananda | 8 | 5,450 | – | – |
| Kristiansen, Kjeld & family | 11 | 4,060 | – | – |
| Kwong, Ching Chiat | 69 | 480 | 330 | 150 |
| Laing, Sir Martin & family | 200 | 130 | 120 | 10 |
| Lazari, Chris & family | 34 | 1,104 | 870 | 234 |
| Lee Tak-yee, Sammy & family | 23 | 1,800 | 400 | 1,400 |
| Leslau, Nick | 130 | 250 | 200 | 50 |
| Lewis, David & family | 89 | 380 | 380 | 0 |
| Lewis, Alan | 122 | 270 | 260 | 10 |
| Linnett, Freddie & The Murphy family | 61 | 580 | 580 | 0 |
| Livingstone, Ian & Richard | 14 | 2,600 | 2,300 | 300 |
| Lodha, Mangal & family | 22 | 1,988 | – | – |
| Lowy, Frank & family | 14 | 2,600 | 3,900 | -1,300 |
| Lyons, Anthony | 77 | 450 | 425 | 25 |
| Mabey, David & family | 141 | 220 | 272 | -52 |
| MacDonald-Hall, Caspar | 79 | 440 | 440 | 0 |
| MacGregor, Roy & family | 109 | 300 | 137 | 163 |
| Mackay, Giles | 239 | 100 | 100 | 0 |
| Mactaggart, Sir John & family | 175 | 160 | 141 | 19 |
| Magnier, John | 64 | 540 | 560 | -20 |
| Marshall, Chris & family | 225 | 117 | 116 | 1 |
| Marston, John & family | 234 | 105 | 95 | 10 |
| Martin, Tom & family | 191 | 147 | 135 | 12 |
| McCarthy, Clinton & John & Spencer | 125 | 260 | 185 | 75 |
| McManus, JP | 65 | 535 | 530 | 5 |
| Mellon, Jim | 43 | 850 | 800 | 50 |
| Meyrick, Sir George | 216 | 120 | 110 | 10 |
| Michael, Sir Peter | 193 | 145 | 155 | -10 |
| Mickel, Bruce & family | 199 | 132 | – | – |
| Monk, Stuart & family | 180 | 157 | 147 | 10 |
| Moran, Christopher | 109 | 300 | 264 | 36 |
| Morgan, Neil & family | 239 | 100 | – | – |
| Morgan, Steve | 58 | 610 | 585 | 25 |
| Morris, Jack & family | 232 | 106 | 105 | 1 |
| Mortstedt, Sten & family | 82 | 430 | 367 | 63 |
| Moser, Henry & family | 92 | 350 | 350 | 0 |
| Moussaieff, Alisa & family | 84 | 410 | 347 | 63 |
| Muir, John & family | 239 | 100 | 96 | 4 |
| Murphy, Kathy/Bernard/Caroline | ||||
| & family | 104 | 318 | – | – |
| Murphy, Alan | 160 | 190 | 190 | 0 |
| Noé, Leo & family | 67 | 500 | 500 | 0 |
| Northumberland, The Duke of | 95 | 340 | 325 | 15 |
| O’Hare, Gerard | 183 | 150 | 150 | 0 |
| Ogden, Sir Robert | 183 | 150 | 150 | 0 |
| Oglesby, Michael & family | 100 | 325 | 340 | -15 |
| Ortega, Amancio | 1 | 35,777 | – | – |
| Panayiotou, Andreas | 109 | 300 | 365 | -65 |
| Pearl, David | 168 | 172 | 139 | 33 |
| Pears, Mark & family | 19 | 2,300 | 2,100 | 200 |
| Pervez, Sir Anwar & family | 30 | 1,310 | 1,030 | 280 |
| Petchey, Jack | 63 | 550 | 450 | 100 |
| Pidgley, Tony | 151 | 205 | 176 | 29 |
| Portman, Viscount & family | 25 | 1,590 | 1,385 | 205 |
| Powell, Alastair & Michael | 90 | 360 | 330 | 30 |
| Prowting, Peter & Elizabeth | 192 | 146 | 105 | 41 |
| Queen, The | 97 | 330 | 320 | 10 |
| Quinn, Lochlann | 216 | 120 | – | – |
| Rankin, William & family | 239 | 100 | 92 | 8 |
| Rayne, Robert & family | 116 | 290 | 260 | 30 |
| Reuben, David & Simon | 5 | 9,000 | 8,300 | 700 |
| Richardson, Roy & family | 69 | 480 | 500 | -20 |
| Richmond, Duke of & Gordon & family | 239 | 100 | 100 | 0 |
| Ritblat, Sir John & family | 162 | 180 | 140 | 40 |
| Roberts, David & family | 216 | 120 | 150 | -30 |
| Roditi, Nicholas | 48 | 775 | 500 | 275 |
| Rohan, Ken & family | 224 | 118 | 120 | -2 |
| Ronson, Gerald & family | 141 | 220 | 220 | 0 |
| Rosenfeld, Andrew | 216 | 120 | 100 | 20 |
| Ross, David | 41 | 900 | 732 | 168 |
| Roxburghe, The Duke of | 216 | 120 | 105 | 15 |
| Safra, Joseph | 2 | 9,390 | – | – |
| Sagi, Teddy | 26 | 1,500 | – | – |
| Salisbury, Marquess of | 109 | 300 | 275 | 25 |
| Scott, Walter | 183 | 150 | 150 | 0 |
| Scowcroft, Brian & Janet Lefton | 173 | 162 | 162 | 0 |
| Seddon, The family | 200 | 130 | 130 | 0 |
| Sellar, Irvine & James | 154 | 200 | 200 | 0 |
| Shahmoon, Eli & family | 120 | 275 | 275 | 0 |
| Shanly, Michael | 101 | 320 | 265 | 55 |
| Sheikh, Younus & family | 130 | 250 | 186 | 64 |
| Silvester, Dominic | 175 | 160 | – | – |
| Sinclair, Duncan & family | 200 | 130 | 110 | 20 |
| Sitorus, Martua | 36 | 1,060 | 1,280 | -220 |
| Slowe, Michael & Robert & family | 172 | 166 | 166 | 0 |
| Smith, Jeff | 200 | 130 | 123 | 7 |
| Smith, Sir Paul & Lady | 107 | 310 | 280 | 30 |
| Steinberg, Mark | 162 | 180 | 0 | 0 |
| Sugar, Lord | 39 | 950 | 900 | 50 |
| Sullivan, David | 49 | 750 | 750 | 0 |
| Suttie, Ian | 77 | 450 | 450 | 0 |
| Sutton, Sir Richard & family | 182 | 154 | 150 | 4 |
| Sykes, Paul | 55 | 650 | – | – |
| Tabor, Michael | 59 | 600 | 550 | 50 |
| Tan, Robert & Pauline | 195 | 137 | – | – |
| Taylor, Neil & family | 141 | 220 | 200 | 20 |
| Tayub, Rashid & Aziz & family | 148 | 210 | 210 | 0 |
| Thomas, Sir Stanley & Peter | 138 | 235 | 230 | 5 |
| Townshend, Charlotte | 84 | 410 | 375 | 35 |
| Vernon, Stephen | 129 | 253 | 253 | 0 |
| Versteegh, Gerard & family | 216 | 120 | 120 | 0 |
| Walker, Mike & family | 239 | 100 | 97 | 3 |
| Warren, Geoffrey | 109 | 300 | 220 | 80 |
| Watkin, Jones Glyn & family | 237 | 102 | 96 | 6 |
| Weiping, Xu | 108 | 307 | – | – |
| Westminster, The Duke of | 7 | 8,400 | 8,000 | 400 |
| Wheatcroft, Kevin | 216 | 120 | 110 | 10 |
| Whelan, Dave & family | 154 | 200 | 160 | 40 |
| Whittaker, John & family | 21 | 2,000 | 2,300 | -300 |
| Wickens, Roger & family | 210 | 125 | 102 | 23 |
| Widdowson, Gary | 162 | 180 | 170 | 10 |
| Wiese, Christo | 18 | 2,500 | 2,250 | 250 |
| Wilson, David & family | 79 | 440 | – | – |
| Wilson, Judith & Fergus | 239 | 100 | – | – |
| Wing Yip, Woon & family | 239 | 100 | – | – |
| Wong, Chun Hong | 86 | 400 | – | – |
| Wood, Peter | 59 | 600 | – | – |
| Woolf, Douglas & family | 210 | 125 | 125 | 0 |
| Wray, Nigel | 137 | 240 | 230 | 10 |
| Zabludowicz, Poju & Anita | 26 | 1,500 | 1,500 | 0 |
| Zakay, Eddie & Sol | 13 | 2,750 | 2,520 | 230 |
| Zhaoxing, Ni | 45 | 810 | 1,475 | -665 |
Rules of engagement
1 Valuations for quoted companies are usually based on their share price as at early October 2014.
2 Foreign nationals are included if they are either planning or have undertaken a substantial investment in the UK. They are not included if they are only making private purchases or developing a second or third home for themselves in London or elsewhere without any associated development for commercial purposes.
3 For private companies we have based valuations largely on their latest net asset figure. After the credit crunch and property crash, we have been cautious in our private company valuations – particularly where accounts are not up-to-date.
4 We have also been influenced by levels of borrowings, the strength of the balance sheet and credit ratings in arriving at our figures. Where private companies pay large salaries to their owner-directors, we have added a proportion of the salary to our profit and wealth calculation.
5 Though there may be some concern about valuations in the current economic climate, we take comfort from the fact that private companies are much more conservative in their balance sheets and that the net asset figure may not reflect the true position. Second, many of the property tycoons who have private companies also have large assets elsewhere that we do not know about.
6 We have counted family trusts as part of family shareholdings in making our assessments of company ownerships.
7 Only those who have made or invested all or a significant part of their fortunes in property investment, trading or related areas, such as estate agency or architecture, qualify for this list. Where construction magnates have a significant property or development element in their portfolio, we have included or excluded them on a case-by-case basis.
8 In assessing the wealth of many of the international rich who have been buying trophy commercial assets in London or undertaking large development projects, the rich lists in their countries have been helpful in assessing wealth. We acknowledge our debt to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the Forbes World Billionaires list and all the various Forbes country lists, the Hurun Rich List in China, Fame and Dash produced by BvD in London and Factiva.
Inevitably we will have missed people who feel they should have been included. We ask them to send in their details for next year to philipberesford@aol.com. Any other comments also gratefully received here.
All our calculations for valuations are ballpark figures, which may be challenged by those listed. We have no access to their bank accounts and have relied on publicly available information or such unpublished information which is volunteered to us by those listed for the specific purpose of being published in the rich list. We are careful not to go into any family detail or to publish any information about where they live or their lifestyles. We will adjust valuations next year for any who feel that we have been too wide of the mark.
All totals are correct as of 20 November 2014.
Dr Philip Beresford also compiles The Sunday Times Rich List
• If you have any comments, please contact our number-cruncher Dr Philip Beresford, compiler of The Sunday Times Rich List, directly at philipberesford@aol.com
