Estates Gazette Rich List 2011 – 21- 50
When Estates Gazette published its annual Rich List last year, property’s surviving super rich were under starter’s orders, raring to go. So this year they should have been off. But in the current gloom, the so-called recovery is looking more like a false start as runners and riders face increasingly soft ground.
The good news is that the top 250 thoroughbreds in the Estates Gazette Rich List are now worth a total of £87bn, up a cool £15bn on last year.
Return to Rich List 2011 homepage
21 Peter Green
£725m
Luscar
2010: £650m (+£75m)
Green made serious money from investing in the Savoy Group in 2004. And his enthusiasm for hotel investment has brought him further success.
The recent sale of a 25% stake in luxury hotel group Maybourne netted around £75m for the Green family – treble its initial investment.
Green’s father was a Manchester
draper who later developed a chain of grocery shops which were sold in 1965
to Tesco. But he married Canadian industrial heiress Mary-Jean Mitchell in the mid-1970s. Her father died in 1983 and, seven years later, she died of cancer at the age of 38.
Green was effectively left in charge of
the family business with their two sons.
In 1996, much of the family’s huge Canadian mining operations, held via Luscar Ltd, were sold in a £300m deal. The Green family invested around 10% of their proceeds in a new Luscar company, which was taken over in 2001 in a £600m deal, netting the family perhaps £50m.
In 1996, the family also made a £60m profit from selling its stake in a small energy company. The family properties in Bermuda, London and the like, plus remaining assets in Canada and the profits from his London deals, put Green, 76, at around £725m.
22 Peter Jones & Family
£707m
Emerson Developments (Holdings)
2010: £673m (+£34m)
Peter Jones’s company Emerson Developments continues to thrive. He has taken his development work to Portugal and Spain as well as continuing with numerous projects in the UK.
This year in the UK alone he has projects in Yorkshire – including Arundel Park near Rotherham, which will provide 92 properties – and a brand new development in Blackpool.
Jones himself founded the company Emerson Developments, based in Alderley Edge. Jones moved into housebuilding in Cheshire way back in 1959.
He was one of the first developers to spot the development potential of south Manchester, buying up tracts of land cheaply. He never looked back.
In 2009-10, Emerson made a £24.7m profit on £158.6m sales. It is worth its £640m net assets.
Jones, 76, has another company, PE Jones (Properties), with around £51m of net assets in 2009-10. Jones and family trusts own them both. We value the businesses at £691m, and add £16m for other assets and property.
23 Richard Caring
£700m
International Clothing Designs (Holdings)
2010: £600m (+£100m)
Caprice Holdings, the restaurant company belonging to Richard Caring, is on the hunt for more restaurant sites for its Côte bistro format.
Caring wants to roll out 120 outlets by the end of 2013; currently, it has around 30. Caprice Holdings, which runs The Ivy, J Sheekey and Le Caprice restaurants in the West End, Daphne’s in South Kensington and Scott’s in Mayfair, made a £9.7m profit on £60.7m sales in the 18 months to December 2010.
A fashion tycoon originally, Caring owns International Clothing Designs (Holdings), a London-based supplier of fashion garments to the likes of Next, Bhs, Top Shop and M&S.
He has been the middle man between the Far East suppliers and retail giants here, supplying 70% of the garments sold by all the British fashion retailers. In 2009-10, profits at the company came in at £135,000 on £36.1m sales.
But this is but a fraction of the total of Caring’s wealth. The nearest Caring admits to his wealth is “nine figures”. He inherited the business from his father and built it up after spending many years in the Far East himself building up contacts that were to serve him well. Caring also made a fortune in property deals in Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s.
Caring is still busy buying upmarket eateries and night clubs in London. In January 2008, he bought out 28 minority shareholders in the trendy Soho House club in a £105m deal. His 80% stake there is now worth £240m. That followed on from his £90m purchase of the upmarket Annabel’s nightclub from the late Mark Birley in June 2007.
He does sell – at a profit. In 2005 he bought the Bierodrome and Strada restaurant chains for £57m and sold them two years later for £140m.
With the Soho House revaluation, Caring, 63, is now easily worth £700m.
24 The Jatania Brothers
£700m
Lornamead
2010: £600m (+£100m)
Lornamead Group, a UK-based manufacturer of personal products, had a record 2009-10, making around £50m profit on its worldwide operations.
The company has a Surrey-based subsidiary, Lornamead Acquisitions, which made £31.5m profit on £95.4m sales in that period. In April this year,
it acquired the naturally medicated skincare brand, Witch.
Lornamead is run and co-owned by
four brothers, led by chief executive Mike, 46, with George, 61, Vin, 56, and Danny, 52. The family came to Britain from Uganda in 1969.
Lornamead buys unwanted toiletry
or beauty care brands from multi-national companies and, in 2005, snapped up the famous Yardley brand for a reported £60m. Last year, it sold off part of Yardley for nearly £30m. But it is the brothers’ extensive £200m property portfolio that qualifies them for this list. They should easily be worth £700m.
25 Prince Charles
£680m
Duchy of Cornwall
2010: £680m (No change)
The heir to the throne is passionate about development, as his intervention in the long-running saga over the proposed development of Chelsea Barracks has shown. He is also one of Britain’s most innovative property developers.
Poundbury, outside Dorchester in Dorset, was built on Duchy of Cornwall land and tested his ideas on architecture, the environment and town planning.
The Duchy, 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 2009-10, it produced a surplus of £14.7m.
The Duchy also saw a sharp rise in its 2009-10 net assets to nearly £664m after a dip in 2008-09. Its prime properties performed particularly well and the overall value of its commercial portfolio rose 9% to £141m. We value the Duchy on its net asset figure, and the 62-year-old prince at £680m.
26 Sir Donald Gordon & Family
£630m
Liberty International Holdings
2010: £580m (+£50m)
It has been a busy year for Sir Donald Gordon’s two new companies, formed by the demerger of quoted property group Liberty International.
Earlier this year, Capital Shopping Centres purchased the 1.4m sq ft Trafford Centre in Manchester for £1.6bn. But there were distractions, with US giant Simon Property Group making an unwanted bid. Gordon, whose family owns just over 13% of CSC, saw the US company beat a retreat and John Whittaker take a friendly stake in the company.
Meanwhile, Capital & Counties is spearheading plans to regenerate Earls Court in West London.
Gordon, 81, started a South African
life insurance operation in the 1950s, finally selling out of it in 1999. He also focused on British property through Liberty International.
His family stakes in the two new Capital operations are worth £507m. South African share sales and other assets add around £150m, but hefty charitable donations cut the Gordon family back to around £630m.
27 Chris Lazari
£614m
Lazari Investments
2010: £522m (+£92m)
West End and North London investor Chris Lazari has seen his portfolio increase by almost £80m this year.
The temporary loss of a tenant at Henrietta House led to a marginal 1.6% drop in income to £78.4m for Lazari Investments, but later in the
year the building was re-let to agent CBRE for its UK headquarters.
Lazari has a blue-chip London-based portfolio which has ridden the property downturn well. The group is also well placed for rental growth due to the continuing shortage of office space in the West End. Total occupancy across Lazari’s 2.5m sq ft portfolio stood at just over 94%. As a result, profits at Lazari Investments hit £42m in 2010-11 with net assets coming in at £544.3m.
The Greek Cypriot came to Britain in the early 1970s to work in the fashion business. In 1978, he diversified into property and has never looked back. Cautiously though, in the current climate for property, we value the Lazari property interests on the latest net asset figure.
We add another £70m to his portfolio for personal property and cash in the bank, taking Lazari, 65, to £614m.
28 Jim Mellon
£580m
Regent Pacific Corporate Finance
2010: £530m (+£50m)
Seventy per cent of Jim Mellon’s wealth is invested in the German property market.
Mellon, who started out as a fund manager in Hong Kong in the late 1970s, has made his money from a range of investments, including a £55m return on an investment firm called Charlemagne Capital in 2006.
He has also invested heavily in solar power and says it will be “bigger than the internet within five years”.
Mellon has stakes of around £25m in a number of quoted companies we can see. The Isle of Man-based entrepreneur is
one of the island’s biggest property owners. He has two homes there, four other homes around Europe and several properties in Ibiza.
He flies in an £8m private jet, but with annual earnings of £5m-10m, he can certainly afford it.
More recently, Mellon, 54, has made substantial profits in the currency markets. His Hong Kong-listed company Regent Pacific is cash rich, with its main investments in China and commodities, particularly uranium.
He is now easily worth £580m.
29 Trevor Hemmings
£550m
Northern Trust Group
2010: £500m (+£50m)
Leisure tycoon Trevor Hemmings has
two passions: football and racing. In April, his horse, Ballabriggs, won the Aintree Grand National, his second triumph in
the great race.
Hemmings could make a lot of money from selling his 41.5% stake in Arena Leisure, which runs Doncaster, Royal Windsor and Lingfield Park racecourses.
But football is not so lucrative for Hemmings. He had to rescue his beloved Preston North End in July 2010 by paying the club’s latest tax bill.
Hemmings, who holds an 88.5% stake in North End, loaned the struggling football club £200,000 through his Guild Ventures investment group.
Hemmings’ loans to the club are now just shy of £15m. But he has the cash, having sold the famous Blackpool Tower to the local council for around £40m recently. In addition, his Northern Trust company has revealed plans to redevelop a former Pontins site in Hemsby, Norfolk, with 191 homes and a care home.
Northern Trust has also expanded its portfolio in Scotland with the acquisition of 16,000 sq ft of industrial space in Livingston.
Hemmings started out as a bricklayer’s apprentice locally in Leyland, and later built his own housebuilding firm, which he sold for £1.5m in the early 1970s to the late Sir Fred Pontin.
Hemmings became Sir Fred’s right-hand man in the Pontins leisure operation. Later, he took over the business and sold it in 1989 for a hefty profit.
In 2000, he bought Littlewoods’ pools operation from the Moores family for £161m. His main holding company, the Northern Trust Group, has £110m net assets in its 2010-11 accounts.
His pub company, Trust Inns, has £93.4m net assets, while we can see £55m of stakes in quoted companies.
Hemmings, 76, is now easily worth £550m.
30 Freddie Linnett & The Murphy Family
£550m
Charles Street Buildings (Leicester)
2010: £510m (+£40m)
Freddie Linnett’s Leicestershire-based property company, Charles Street Buildings, owns more than 6m sq ft across the UK. Profits from the company fell from £33.6m to £30.7m on £40.1m sales in the year to November 2010.
Despite this, earlier this year the firm bought energy giant E.ON’s new HQ in Nottingham for £30m.
Freddie Linnett is a director and leading shareholder in the business, which was started by her uncles, who came to Britain from Ireland after the war. When the uncles died, Linnett inherited their stakes. She married a top accountant in 1995.
We value the business on its near £516m of net assets.
Other assets and nearly £94m of dividends from 1995 to 2010, take Linnett, 61, and the Leicester-based Murphy family, to £550m after tax.
31 Sir Anwar Pervez & Family
£550m
Bestway (Holdings)
2010: £580m (-£30m)
Bestway, Pervez’s cash-and-carry company, managed to sweep up 13 awards at this year’s International Wine Challenge Awards. Though profits in 2009-10 fell
to £58.1m on sales of £1.65bn, the net assets rose to £489m.
Bestway’s founder, Pervez, is the son of a Rawalpindi farmer, who came to Britain at 21 and opened his first shop in 1962. He built a chain of 11 shops and then in 1976 turned to cash and carry with his first
depot in West London.
In the current climate, we value parent company Bestway (Holdings) at around £700m while Pervez, his family and trusts have a £330m stake.
A separate property operation,
Palmbest, is why Pervez is on this list. Palmbest and other personal assets should add another £220m.
Pervez, 76, would be much richer if
he did not give large amounts to charity every year.
32 The Duke of Bedford
£520m
Woburn Abbey
2010: £490m (+£30m)
Bedford’s 342-year-old Bedford Estate in London owns around 180 buildings in Bloomsbury. Death duties and land sales have diluted the original portfolio, but many leases created shortly after the war are now reverting back to the estate, allowing renovations and conversions from office back to residential use.
The new £200m Center Parcs holiday village on his Woburn estate has got the go-ahead and is on course for a 2013 opening.
Harrow and Harvard-educated Bedford, 49, is well versed in the management of the extraordinary 13,000-acre Woburn Abbey estate and house. He has various successful business ventures under his control at Woburn, which were set up by his grandfather to pay a £4.5m bill for death duties.
Bedford’s late father left £39.1m in his will, but we assume that much of the estate had been handed over some years ago as part of the family’s tax planning.
Though we can see just £10m of net assets in the 2010 accounts of three family companies, including Woburn Enterprises, the house and grounds must easily be worth £120m. But it is the art treasures inside, including 24 Canalettos, that are particularly valuable.
They should be worth well over £300m, but we halve that to £150m to allow for any inheritance tax in the event of a sale.
The London estate is now easily worth £200m and its value is bolstered by the regeneration of nearby King’s Cross. We raise Bedford to £520m this year.
33 John Magnier
£520m
Coolmore Stud Farm
2010: £540m (-£20m)
With his also Irish business partner JP McManus, John Magnier has been shrewdly building his stake in the troubled pub group Mitchells & Butlers.
Together, they have been steadily buying shares through their Elpida vehicle since late 2007 and now own more than 24% of the company, which has a market cap close to £1bn. This makes them key players in any future takeover battle for the pub giant, which has just seen off one bid.
Pubs are just the latest investment area for the low-key Magnier. With McManus, Magnier is perhaps best known to the British public for the £227m stake they held in Manchester United, the Premiership football club, until May 2005. When they sold to new United owner, Malcolm Glazer, the pair made a £90m profit on their original investment.
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, but such is the parlous state of racing finances that we cut its value to just £70m.
He was part of a consortium that bought the radio assets of Chrysalis Group for £170m and he also made a tidy £23m from the sale of a 13% stake in Devro, the Scottish sausage skin maker.
With McManus and fellow Irish tycoon Dermot Desmond, he has a stake in Barchester, a profitable nursing home operation, and the Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados. These stakes are worth £311m after borrowings.
He shared in a £40m windfall in February 2006, selling an option on a London office site. With McManus and Desmond, he also sold the Next Generation fitness chain for around £132m.
He and MacManus plus another partner, Aidan Brooks, have a £1bn property portfolio held in Sloane Capital.
Magnier, 63, also has homes in Spain, Ireland, Barbados and Switzerland, where he lives for tax purposes. But he is not immune to the downturn and, in all, his assets add up to £520m of wealth.
34 Leo Noé & Family
£500m
Agra
2010: £500m (No change)
Leo Noé, one of the more low-key property men in Britain, has sold his British Israel Investments property and construction operation, where he had a 55.8% stake through trusts, to the Israeli Ofer family. That stake was worth around £174m.
Noé, 58, is known for his shrewd reading of the market. His expertise was highlighted in July 2008 when his company, REIT, merged with F&C Asset Management to create F&C Reit Asset Management.
The deal, in which REIT collected £60m in cash and loan notes, created a new commercial property management business with £8.5bn of real estate worldwide.
There are £68m of net assets in a number of companies owned by the Noé family, such as Agra and Landmaster Properties. Past property sales have boosted its wealth: in 2006, for example, Noé sold its Fosse Retail Park for £360m, just a year after buying it for £307m.
In 2004, Noé sold three shopping centres in the north of England for £378.5m, which had been bought in 2002-03 for £294m – so clearly he is a very shrewd operator, able to spot value that other less canny property men cannot. In all, we value Noé at £500m.
35 Michael Evans & Family
£490m
Evans Property Holdings
2010: £400m (+£90m)
Michael Evans’ late father started Evans of Leeds as a transport firm more than 70 years ago but moved into housebuilding and property. The Evans family floated the company on the stock market in 1971 but took it private in 1999 in a £164m deal. Now known as Evans Property, it is involved in development work largely in the north of England.
The family’s Millshaw Park estate in Leeds has recently undergone a £1.3m refurbishment. Its parent company, Brightsea EPH, showed an £8.4m profit and £440m of net assets in 2009-10. We add £50m for other assets and past dividends to the family led by 75-year-old Monaco-based Evans.
37 Jack Petchey
£480m
Trefick
2010: £500m (-£20m)
A consortium including veteran investor Jack Petchey made a tentative takeover
bid recently for Lookers, the quoted car dealer. Their bid was at 80p a share, but after due diligence, the consortium reckoned the company had a couple of issues that made it worth less than that
and offered 70p a share.
The company rejected this, and the consortium said it would not bid. Nevertheless, Petchey still has a £34.5m stake in Lookers through his Trefick company.
A canny East End investor and property man, Petchey reckons the recession is the worst he has seen in his 86 years. He has taken hits on several high-profile investments. But Petchey can afford it.
In 2006 and 2007, he sold around £225m of stakes in six companies, including a pub chain, Aston Villa football club and Reg Vardy, the car dealer.
He had no formal education and is a
self-taught deal-maker.
Using his £39 army gratuity, he built a fleet of taxis after the war. He later expanded into used cars, property and timeshare.
He plans to give the bulk of his fortune to charity through the Jack Petchey Foundation, and has already given away £65m to supporting youth projects in London and the Home Counties.
With earlier proceeds and past profits of £300m plus, his quoted investments have yielded around £400m of wealth. Timeshare and property interests take Petchey to £480m.
38 Ronald Hobson
£470m
Consolidated Property Investments
2010: £470m (No change)
After the Second World War, Ronald Hobson and Sir Donald Gosling together had the idea to build car parks on old bomb sites – the resulting National Car Parks was a phenomenal success.
They sold the parent company, National Parking Corporation, in 1998, collecting around £290m each.
In 2004-05, they divested themselves of further property companies, Consolidated Property Investments and later Metrose Property, for a total of £189m.
The modest Hobson should have made around £97m from those two deals. With Gosling as a partner, he still has stakes in some small property companies, in which there are £12m of net assets.
Recent property company sales and the large dividends from National Parking before its sale keeps 90-year-old Hobson on £470m this year.
39 Sir Donald Gosling
£450m
Consolidated Property Investments
2010: £450m (No change)
Sir Donald Gosling’s passion for the sea and Navy encouraged him to recently pay for the crew of the Ark Royal aircraft carrier to have a night out in risqué Hamburg in November, ahead of its March 2011 decommissioning.
He is president of the White Ensign Association, the naval charity. His yacht, the 245ft Leander, was named after
HMS Leander, in which Gosling served
as a signalman after the war.
With partner Ronald Hobson, the
two formed the National Parking Corporation (best known for its yellow signposted NCP car parks) in 1948. Fifty years later they sold it, netting around £290m each.
NPC gained them hefty dividends over the years, as did other properties.
Gosling had a 40% stake in a property company, Consolidated Property Investments, which was sold in 2004
for £77m.
More recently, Gosling and Hobson sold their Metrose property operation for £112m. The pair still have four small property companies with £12m net
assets between them.
The 82-year-old Gosling should be worth at least £450m.
40 Jack Dellal
£445m
Allied Commercial Holdings
2010: £450m (-£5m)
Jack Dellal, 88, became a major player in the property market when he sold his Dalton Bank for £58m in the early 1970s.
His most memorable deal was when he made £75m in six months in 1987 by buying and quickly selling the BBC’s Bush House in central London.
He continued to be active throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
The now low-key dealmaker’s expertise is matched only by his virility – in his late 70s he became a father again, to his
ninth child.
Dellal’s main company, Allied Commercial Holdings, turned in a £2.8m loss on £10.5m sales in 2009-10, while its net assets also fell slightly to £52.1m. We clip the Dellal family back to £445m.
41 Anthony Lyons
£425m
Matterhorn Capital
2010: £350m (+£75m)
Anthony Lyons, 44, seems to just keep getting it right. Selling his Hampstead home for £43m in early 2010, he packed up and relocated to the Bahamas.
However, the shrewd dealmaker did
not stop investing. His most recent project is an investment in Data Centres that
has a potential end value of £400m.
Moreover, working with Sir Philip Green’s stepson Brett Palos, Lyons made a terrific £27.5m profit in just one year
on the sale of the 02 centre in North London.
More recently, the partners have been negotiating the sale of part of their holdings in the heart of Hammersmith, W6, to Tony Pidgley’s Berkeley Group.
Other key investments have been sold in a deal spree worth £1bn. It was in July 2007, just a month before the credit crunch struck, that Lyons and his partners sold half of Earls Court & Olympia in a deal
that valued it at £380m. They recently
sold the rest.
With the data deal flurry, we value Lyons, whose main company is Matterhorn Capital, at £425m.
42 Clarke Family
£400m
Le Masurier Ltd
2010: £400m (No change)
C Le Masurier, one of Jersey’s oldest and largest property firms, recently submitted plans for a 300,000 sq ft office development on the island. The £150m project will see buildings between Broad Street and Commercial Street in St Helier transformed into one of the greenest properties in Jersey.
A new “street” under a covered atrium will be open to the public and include high-quality restaurants, pubs and wine bars. The company is owned by the Clarke family, now the largest private landowners on the island.
The family has large tracts of St Helier, retail outlets and pub sites across Jersey. Their business – C Le Masurier – is celebrating its 175th birthday this year. It also owns property in the UK, Luxembourg, Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic.
The death in 2001 of patriarch Fred Clarke led to a major refocusing of this secretive family business with the aim of raising asset values.
But for now we keep the family at a conservative £400m.
42 Lord Edmiston
£400m
IM Properties
2010: £320m (+£80m)
This year IM Properties continues to be immensely active with its investments. Of late, the company has secured a new senior debt funding of £95m from Handelsbanken for a five-year term.
This facility follows a recent announcement that IM Properties has
also secured a £55m funding package
from Clydesdale Bank to refinance one of its portfolios.
Edmiston is confident that, with the new funding, IM is in a robust financial position. This is reflected in the new acquisition of Purley Way retail park in Croydon for £21.2m.
In addition, Kuehne and Nagel has shortlisted Edmiston’s company for the development of the 400-acre Coppice Business Park near Birmingham.
The newly-enobled Lord Edmiston,
65, took his seat in the Lords in January this year. An accountant who once worked for the now-defunct Jensen sports car operation, Edmiston has built the Warwickshire-based IM Group into one
of Britain’s biggest importers of Far Eastern cars.
It also has a thriving property operation. Most recently, it made £21.8m profit on £401.6m sales in 2010.
We value the company on its £411m net assets figure. Since 1998, Edmiston has taken more than £81m in salaries and dividends from IM Group, but has given over £120m to charity.
We value him at £400m.
42 Tony Gallagher
£400m
Gallagher UK
2010: £425m (-£25m)
Gallagher divides its business into the Gallagher Developments commercial operation and Gallagher Estates residential arm.
Gallagher Developments is currently pushing forward with a £46m joint venture development set to include a new facility for steel giant Corus.
The company owns land with consent
for 6m sq ft of development, while Gallagher Estates has one of the largest land banks in the UK, comprising 35,000 plots, mostly in the extended South East.
Gallagher, 60, sold several large retail parks in the first half of last year, but still owns a large retail park investment portfolio in the UK.
We can see £242m of net assets in the 2009 and 2010 accounts of his companies. Other assets take him to £400m.
42 Andreas Panayiotou
£400m
Ability Group
2010: £250m (+£150m)
This year Andreas Panayiotou’s Ability Group sold a 13,500 sq ft West London office at 7-9 Portland place to Galliard Homes. In March, his new five-star hotel opened at West London’s Syon Park, so it has been all go for the former boxer.
The £60m development, operating under Hilton’s Waldorf Astoria name, takes Ability’s hotel portfolio to seven, with a value of around £330m.
Panayiotou, of Cypriot parentage, is famous for selling most of his residential portfolio at the end of 2006 in anticipation of a property crash.
He plans to develop a number of other Hilton brands in the UK and Europe, with the intention of amassing a portfolio of more than 40 hotel properties by 2012.
Ability Developments turned in a £7.1m profit on £57m turnover in 2010, when the net asset figure rose slightly to £144.4m.
But taking into account the group’s development portfolio and other assets, we value Panayiotou, 45, at £400m.
42 Steve Morgan
£400m
Redrow Group
2010: £350m (+£50m)
The chronic housing shortage will protect Britain from a property crash, says Redrow chairman Morgan. Sales prices for Redrow’s homes rose 12.5% in the year to 30 June, pushing revenue up to £453m.
Morgan is also the owner of Wolverhampton Wanderers football club, which just survived its second season in the Premier League in May and will doubtless consume some of his fortune.
Morgan started life labouring for his father’s small civil engineering company. Later, he worked with a local civil engineering contractor for two years. But when that company pulled out of the market in the 1974 recession, Morgan set up his own business.
Twenty years later, as one of the biggest house builders in Britain, Redrow was floated on the stock market.
Morgan sold £240m worth of shares in the float and further tranches were sold off afterwards when he left the Redrow board in 2000.
He also had a £100m stake in the De Vere leisure group, which was the subject of a bidding battle in the summer of 2006. In addition, Morgan recently shared the £75m sale proceeds on a Spanish development.
In March 2009, he returned to Redrow as chairman, but with the share price languishing, is looking to take it private in a £400m deal. He has a £109m stake.
Allowing for reinvestment of sale proceeds and other assets, Morgan, 58, is worth perhaps £400m after tax.
47 David Sullivan
£398m
Roldvale
2010: £400m (-£2m)
The latest accounts for David Sullivan’s property company, Conegate Holdings, show that he paid himself a £1.5m dividend after it almost doubled pretax profits to £10.3m in 2010.
Conegate, which owns shops, offices and residential properties across Britain, sold the former London home of the Radio Times, at 35 Marylebone High Street, to Scottish Widows Investment Partnership in the summer for more than £32m. But once again it seems to be football that has kept Sullivan busy.
It must have been a blow when West Ham United, which he co-owns with the Gold brothers, was told last month that its deal to lease the Olympic stadium had collapsed. The Hammers will now have to take part in a new tender to secure tenants for the stadium.
Together with business partner David Gold, Sullivan bought a 50% stake in West Ham in early 2010, valuing the club at £105m.
He just can’t leave football alone: the ink had barely dried on his sale of Birmingham City, where after 16 years he made £20m from selling his stake.
Roldvale, his main company, made a £64,000 loss in 2010.
But his dividends and salaries in the past 13 years have totalled more than £56m. Sport Newspapers, publisher of the lurid tabloids, was sold in 2007 for around £50m. Sullivan bailed it out in 2009 with a £1.68m loan. This could not save the paper from folding, but he later bought it back from the administrator for £50,000.
Sullivan, 62, has been very lucky with the horses too. His David Junior now stands as a stallion in Japan, having won more than £2.5m in prize money in his two-year training career.
Sullivan also has a £300m plus property portfolio. His Conegate property firm showed £160m net assets in 2010.
We clip £2m off Sullivan for the Sport newspaper loan, knocking him down to £398m.
48 Roy Richardson & Family
£395m
Swiftfire
2010: £400m (-£5m)
The Richardson twins – Roy and brother Don, who died in September 2007 – made a name for themselves by building shopping centres, most notably Merry Hill in the Black Country. They sold it in 1992 for a £50m profit.
The family’s Richardson Developments now has schemes across 10 European countries. Since 2008 it has also been involved in plans for a £600m new town project to resurrect the site of the Ravenscraig steelworks.
The Richardsons’ main company, Swiftfire, made a £2.5m profit and showed just over £141.4m of net assets in 2010.
We value the business on the net assets.
There are also £25m of net assets in two more separate firms we can see, including Clubhouse Investments. Other deals and £54m of salaries and dividends in recent years take the Richardson family, now led by 81-year-old Roy alone, to £395m.
49 David Lewis & Family
£380m
Molyneux Securities
New entry
A chartered surveyor, David Lewis ran three quoted property firms in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. With impeccable timing, he sold a number of businesses right at the top of the market, including Hampton Trust, which fetched £100m just before the 1987 crash. Lewis, 72, received £25m for his stake in Hampton.
Lewis’s property empire was valued at £100m in 2006 at the height of the boom.
We can see around £43m of net assets in a number of companies where he has a stake now.
But Lewis’s real wealth comes from his huge 400-strong art collection. Now displayed in museums all over Britain, it contains Old Masters and other works.
Just five were valued at £42m recently.
In all, the collection should be worth
around £300m. We add £80m for other Lewis assets.
49 David Ross
£380m
Carphone Warehouse Group
New entry
Ross invested heavily in the property market through a venture called Kandahar, backed by HBOS (now Lloyds Banking Group). Kandahar was badly hit by the property crash and, in 2009, it had net debt of £247m. Its portfolio is now valued at around £230m.
In January, Ross’s Kandahar sold Drake Circus shopping mall in Plymouth for £240m and has been implementing plans to sell down the entire portfolio.
Ross gave up his job as an accountant in 1989 to co-found the Carphone Warehouse mobile phone retailer with schoolfriend Charles Dunstone. It floated on the stock market in 2000 and last year demerged its TalkTalk telecoms and broadband operation.
Ross has stakes in these two now worth £351m after recent stock market falls. He also sold £104m worth of Carphone shares after the float and £30m of TalkTalk shares recently.
Though Kandahar’s problems caused Ross to pledge some of his stakes in his quoted operations to the banks as collateral, the strong performance of the shares should have eased that plight.
Allowing for any loss on Kandahar sales and shares that may still be pledged, Ross, 46, should be worth £380m.
50 David Wilson & Family
£360m
Wilson Bowden
2010: £350m (+£10m)
David Wilson’s new property operation, Davidsons Developments, focuses principally on housebuilding in the East Midlands but is also active in commercial property. The company made a £1.7m profit on £62.8m sales in 2009-10 and
is worth its £78m net assets.
Wilson, 69, joined his dad’s small building business in 1961 after graduating from the Leicester Polytechnic School of Building. Leicestershire-based Wilson Bowden prospered and was floated on the stock market in 1987. Twenty years later, Wilson sold the company to rival Barratt Developments in a £2.2bn deal. It netted £727m for Wilson and his family trusts in a mix of £304m in cash and the rest in Barratt shares.
His remaining Barratt stake is now worth around £16m as the shares have drifted south recently.
The cash element of the deal, £98m of share sales and dividends over the years at Wilson Bowden, and £78m for Davidsons, take the Wilson family to £360m after tax.
julia.cahill@estatesgazette.com
Rich List 2011 51-80
