149 £160m
Sir William McAlpine & Family
Newarthill
Construction-to-property group Sir Robert McAlpine’s parent company, Newarthill, saw its profits soar in 2006 from £19.7m to £53.1m with sales also rising sharply to £1.25bn. We value the Hemel Hempstead-based business on its near £150m net assets.
Dividends of £25m from 1996 to 2001, including £8.3m in 2000, value the McAlpine family, led by 70-year-old Sir William, at around £160m after tax.
149 £160m
Duncan Sinclair & Family
Mountview Estates
Profits rose sharply in the first half of 2006-07 from £9.3m to £14.2m at London property group Mountview Estates. The business, specialising in residential property, is chaired by accountant Duncan Sinclair, 60. With the shares riding high, the Sinclair family’s stake is worth £156m. We add another £4m for the family’s net assets in smaller private companies.
152 £158m
Bakir Cola & Family
Cola Holdings
London hotel investor Bakir Cola, 65, who runs and owns Cola Holdings, gave himself a £48m dividend in 2006 after seeing the net book value of his properties and developments rise from £189.2m in 2005 to £191.7m last year.
Group profits declined sharply in the year to September 2006, from £19.9m to £1.47m, after the £50m sale of the Harrington Hall hotel to Spain’s NH Hotels. The net asset value of the company was £110.4m, taking Cola to at least £158m.
153 £155m
Andrew Cohen & Family
Wood Hall Securities
Andrew Cohen made his money in retailing when he left school at 17 to work for his father, selling women’s dresses in Scotland.
In 1983, the family acquired the Betterware mail-order homeware business for a knockdown price and transformed it. Yet its 1986 stock market flotation was a disaster. Cohen was not put off, and turned the firm into one of the top retailers in Britain.
The shares soared and, in 1993, the Cohen family made £30m in a share sale.
In 1997, Cohen agreed to sell the firm to a management team, netting £42.7m, but he kept a £12m stake. He was brought back in 2002 to be non-executive chairman. The result? In 2005, the parent company, Betterware Investment, saw its profits soar to £11.8m on £41.7m sales.
Fifty-four-year-old Cohen’s 47.5% stake is now worth £50m. The Cohen family has other property interests, including Wood Hall Securities, with £21m net assets in 2006. In total, the Cohen family should now be worth around £155m, despite hefty investment in a now-sold stables.
153 £155m
Garry Widdowson
GM Metal Recycling
Garry Widdowson’s father founded GD Metal Recycling, with one depot in north London. But it was Garry who became the scrap metal king. In February 2006, he sold the renamed Metal & Waste Recycling to Barclays for an undisclosed sum, but reckoned to be up to £120m, and retained a 22% stake.
Widdowson has diversified into property through Kenninghall Holdings, with around £20m of net assets. He owns a private dock on the Thames and another waste company, Total Waste Management. But Essex-based Widdowson, 49, an international showjumper in his youth, has had hefty salaries and dividends (including £3.3m in 2005) and he should be worth £155m.
155 £154m
Kevin Heaney
Cornishhomes.co.uk
A north London property developer, Kevin Heaney moved to Cornwall in 2001 and has since become a leading developer in Truro. Through his cornishhomes.co.uk operation he is involved in developments in the South West.
Heaney, 44, also chairs Truro City Football Club, which he is seeking to revive, and plans to make it the first professional team in the county with a £2m to £3m investment over the next 10 years.
Heaney’s various Cornish projects are valued at £296m. After borrowings and construction costs, these should yield a £173m-plus profit, but for now we value them at £130m. His existing Cornish property and European assets are valued at £24m. In all, until his new developments are completed, we value Heaney at £154m.
156 £152m
Guy Johnson
The Carphone Warehouse Group
Mobile phone tycoon Guy Johnson left his directorship in the industry in early 2006 when he resigned from the fast-growing Fone Logistics operation. It was early in 2004 that Johnson, 43, sold most of his stake in Carphone Warehouse, the quoted mobile phone retailer, netting £56m.
A co-founder of the London-based operation in 1989 with Charles Dunstone and David Ross, Johnson left the business in 2001 to “take life easier”. He initially moved to Portugal but recently returned to Britain to become involved in new business ventures such as property, private equity and Fone Logistics.
His remaining stake in Carphone Warehouse is worth around £50m. But his other investments easily take him to £152m.
157 £151m
Aneel Mussarat
MCR Property Group
Aneel Mussarat founded Classic Homes in 1989. He started by buying and refurbishing inner-city properties for letting and, in the late 1990s, diversified into higher-quality apartment conversions.
Mussarat moved into larger commercial investments in 2004 with the purchase of various city centre office blocks in Manchester. His new parent company, MCR Property Group, has a commercial and residential portfolio valued at more than £500m.
He is also investing in Dubai, while his flagship development in Manchester is a proposed 28-storey tower. Only 37, he is worth £151m.
158 £150m
Nabeel Chowdery
Property Route
Manchester-based Nabeel Chowdery, 33, has been expanding his business interests in London over the past year. In July, he bought seven luxury flats in Mayfair and in March he took over London-based ASA Properties.
But the former Manchester University student, who started a residential portfolio before he graduated with a degree in finance and accountancy in 1995, is keeping his headquarters in the North. His flagship developments include the Park 66 retail and leisure park in Bury. Earlier this year, he bought a building in Altrincham, Greater Manchester, for £4m, part of which now houses his expanding business operation.
Today, we can see around £145m of net assets in his 11 main property companies, which include Prestige Properties (Manchester). With other personal property assets, Chowdery should be worth £150m.
158 £150m
Anton Bilton & Family
Raven Mount
Anton Bilton’s Raven Mount operation concentrates on property fund management and assisted living for the elderly. He has a near £50m stake in Raven Mount, and a subsidiary, Raven Russia, is now valued at £514m.
Property is in 43-year-old Bilton’s blood. He is the grandson of the late Percy Bilton, the west London property developer who died in 1983. Percy Bilton had built his own quoted property group, which was taken over for £270m by rival Slough Estates after a bitter battle in November 1998.
The Bilton family’s 29.4% stake was worth £79.4m. With these wider family assets added to Anton Bilton’s own business and personal assets (including a magnificent £10m country mansion, his private company Santon Capital, with £14m net assets, and large stakes in the Flowers Gallery and KX Gym in Chelsea), a revised £150m valuation for the Bilton clan is appropriate.
158 £150m
Darragh MacAnthony
Peterborough United FC
The new owner of the Posh is a 31-year-old Irish estate agent. Darragh MacAnthony became chairman of Peterborough United FC after making his fortune selling overseas property to the new rich.
The son of a Dublin nightclub and restaurant owner who retired to Spain, MacAnthony was 16 and ran a nightclub there on the side while he studied. He went to business college in London, lasted two months, and came back to Spain at 23 with just £4,000 to his name. He set up his own property company, MacAnthony Realty International, working from home with a budget of just £5,000.
His inspiration came from living in Marbella as a schoolboy when he saw just how many Britons were investing in the area. Now, his Marbella-based company sells thousands of holiday homes worldwide and has an annual turnover of £100m. He makes his millions by buying property in up-and-coming areas, such as Bulgaria, Croatia and the Dominican Republic.
His company has offices in 15 countries – his father has moved to Florida to supervise employees in the US. The business is reckoned to be worth £150m and MacAnthony has said he will be disappointed if he is not a billionaire in five years.
158 £150m
Pervaiz Naviede
Legendary Property Co
Pervaiz Naviede, 46, started his business career selling “fancy goods” on a stall in Gretna Green market 20 years ago, but he reckoned he should be collecting rent instead of paying it.
He persuaded Safeway to sublet him an empty building which he turned into a market hall and, of course, started collecting rent. He then purchased a shopping parade and, through the mid-to-late 1980s with his partner, Warren Smith, traded in investment properties.
The pair have diversified into acquiring and refurbishing properties for retailers, and old council blocks which they have done up and turned into desirable accommodation in northern cities. Recently, they have been buying up sites in the City and north London.
Naviede’s main company, Legendary Property Co (Aberdeen), showed around £4.5m net assets in 2004-05. And the Guernsey-based Pervaiz Naviede Family Trust, which buys property, is worth around £100m.
LPC Living, the side of the business that deals with residential development, is the final part of the jigsaw and it has really taken off in the past four years. Naviede is also moving into the German market, buying healthcare and nursing home assets. He took a £14.4m dividend in 2002-03.
In all, we value him at £150m.
162 £145m
Kevin Linfoot
KW Linfoot
Work started this year on a Leeds development that 49-year-old Kevin Linfoot believes will mark the pinnacle of his career.
The £225m scheme, put together by Linfoot and Scarborough Development Group on part of the former Royal Mail site in Wellington Street, will boast two mixed-use towers: one, 560ft high, will include 618 flats the other, at 370ft and 32 storeys, will have 220 flats. The development includes offices, shops, bars, restaurants and 356 parking spaces.
“It will be an iconic building for Leeds,” promises Linfoot. “It’s the top of my career to do something like this, I’ll never do anything this big again.” He spent 18 months developing the project, looking at skyscrapers in cities such as New York and Miami.
Linfoot has been in the property game a long time. At 12 years old, he was carrying coal for his father, and later became a carpenter’s apprentice. He began his career as a property developer at 16, buying and selling terraced houses.
In 1981, he started KW Linfoot, building it into one of the North’s leading developers of housing and commercial property. Much of the regeneration of the Leeds city-centre housing market has resulted from Linfoot’s work. The Linfoot Group now has a portfolio of developments (3,000 plots) under way valued at nearly £750m.
More recently, Linfoot has announced radical plans for Yorkshire’s first key worker village, which will aim to provide affordable city homes and facilities for nurses, teaching staff and police workers.
The various Linfoot companies and stakes, including KW Linfoot and West Point Leeds, made around £2.6m profit in 2006. With the huge development work, we value them at £75m allowing for borrowings.
Other businesses, such as a small communications company, add around £9m. Linfoot’s personal property and the largest collection of Socialist Realism Art outside Russia take him to £145m.
163 £140m
Eric Gadsden
WE Black
Eric Gadsden is a determined man. Having acquired a site in the centre of Buckingham, he had to remove 8,500 tons of contamination before work could start on building a block of luxury flats.
But, with a mobile crane, the work was done. It is the sort of commitment that has enabled 62-year-old Gadsden’s Hertfordshire-based company, WE Black, to raise profits to a record £12m on £18.6m sales in 2006.
The developer had a 64.5% profit margin and £83.6m net assets. Gadsden, as owner, took little out of the company, but he had a £1m stake in Newport Holdings, a quoted property company recently taken over a £23m stake in Michelmersh Brick Holdings, a quoted brickmaker he chairs and another £30m of net assets in Three Rivers Property Investments. With his racing interests, Gadsden should be worth at least £140m.
163 £140m
Eric Grove
Catesby Property Group
Eric Grove’s Catesby Property Group has teamed up with another developer to handle the £100m redevelopment of a former Inland Revenue office site in Coventry.
The son of a blacksmith, Grove, 76, started Midlands housebuilder Canberra in 1968, specialising in high-quality houses. He sold the business to Alfred McAlpine in 1988 mainly for McAlpine shares.
While he sold most of his McAlpine shares, netting around £40m, he has become a serious property developer, with retail parks in the Midlands, residential developments in Jersey and a stake in a property investment operation. Recently, he has sold over 1.2m sq ft of warehousing and distribution centres. With cash and other assets, Grove is worth £140m.
163 £140m
Gregory King
Mathon Capital
Scots lawyer Gregory King, 39, comes from a family that has been involved in property finance for generations. In 2005, he started Glasgow-based Mathon Capital, which provides short-term capital for property developers. King’s big idea was to cut the lengthy application process of traditional commercial lenders, which can jeopardise property deals that need quick settlement. King has a 90% stake in the £350m company and should easily be worth £140m.
166 £137m
John Robinson
Investor
A good year in the London property market and with hedge fund investments has helped to boost John Robinson’s fortune. He was John Duffield’s right-hand man at Jupiter Asset Management until he left the group in 2000 with a £50m payoff, which represented his earn-out from the £505m purchase of the business by Germany’s Commerzbank.
After allowing for his property assets and investments, Robinson, 47, is now worth £137m. He is now concentrating on property, particularly residential property at the high end of the market.
167 £136m
John Dunsdon & Family
Coldunell
Coldunell, a Surrey-based property company, increased profits from £2.6m to £3m on £10.4m sales in 2005-06. But its net assets have grown from £98.4m to £105.7m. The business is run by 55-year-old John Dunsdon and owned by his family and trusts.
Dunsdon had a surveying background but learned more from his property dealer father, who founded Coldunell in 1959. Dunsdon is renowned as one of the shrewdest operators in the property auction market.
He began his career attending auctions at Fur Trade House in the City of London before they moved to the Connaught Rooms in Bloomsbury in the early 1970s. Other assets and £8.6m of dividends in recent years take the Dunsdon family to £136m.
168 £135m
Frank Boyd & Family
Killultagh Estates
Frank Boyd, 53, started out as an electrician and still owns an electrical contracting business in Belfast. He began working as a property developer and investor in student housing before moving on to acquiring nursing home sites and office market opportunities.
His main company is Killultagh Estates, owned by his trusts, which is one of the leading property companies in Northern Ireland. It showed its financial muscle in September 2005 when it snapped up the Fareham Shopping Centre in Hampshire for £110m. Killultagh Estates had £75m of net assets in its 2005-06 accounts.
The separate Killultagh Properties is worth its £7.7m net asset figure. Similarly, Castle Glen Developments is worth its £1.7m net assets. Boyd also owns Brunswick (No 1), one of the fastest-growing property companies in Northern Ireland, with Andrew Creighton.
In all, Boyd and his family should be worth £135m, allowing for any overlap of share stakes within Killultagh and Brunswick.
168 £135m
Everard Goodman
Trust of Property Shares
Everard Goodman left Yorkshire to start work in London as an accountant and qualified at 21.
He floated a jewellery business in 1959 and sold it in 1972. Goodman later moved into property before setting up Tops Estates. In 1983, he floated Tops on the then Unlisted Securities Market.
It quietly prospered over the years until May 2005, when Goodman sold up to Land Securities for £517m, walking away with over £130m.
He also had an £8.2m stake in Trust of Property, a quoted investment trust which was wound up voluntarily in early 2006.
The son of a Leeds surveyor, 75-year-old Goodman’s mission now is to use his fortune for charitable purposes. In 2005, he gave £5m to educational and medical charities. Other assets (£2.5m of net assets in small companies) and dividends keep him easily at £135m allowing for his donations.
168 £135m
Simon Karimzadeh & Family
Eskar International
In October 2006, Simon Karimzadeh snapped up a £1.13bn European property portfolio sold by a Swiss hedge fund. At the time, he said he would put around a third of the properties into a new company, European Land, which he wants to float on AIM.
Over 40 years ago, Karimzadeh’s late father started Eskar International, a London-based property trading-to-processing group. Its activities in the 1970s and 1980s spanned tanneries in the Middle and Far East, and dried fruit and nut processing plants as well as trade in iron and steel.
Since then, it has focused on property. Karimzadeh has been in the news in the property pages of late over his efforts to buy the Grade I-listed Apethorp Hall in Northamptonshire for £3.1m, only to be gazumped by the government in the shape of the culture department.
The Karimzadeh family owns all of Eskar, which showed £125m of net assets in 2005-06.
Until we see the European Land flotation, we value the Karimzadeh family on the latest Eskar net asset figure, adding £10m for other assets.
168 £135m
John Guthrie & Family
Broadland Properties
John Guthrie was the biggest winner from the May 2005 sale of the Merchant Retail business to Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing for £222m cash. Guthrie picked up 10% of the company “many years ago” when the shares were trading at 9p. The takeover price valued each share at 197p, so Guthrie made a profit of around £22.3m on the deal.
A chartered surveyor by training, 71-year-old Guthrie chairs Broadland Properties, a private property group based in Scarborough. The Guthrie family owns all the shares either directly or through family trusts.
The business, which was started in 1950, saw its profits fall from £10.89m to £5.1m on sales of £25.2m in the year to September 2006. But we value Broadland on its much higher net assets of nearly £125m. Other assets, such as White Rose Finance (£897,000 net assets) should take the Guthrie family to perhaps £135m after tax.
168 £135m
Sir Robert Ogden
Ogden Group
Sir Robert Ogden’s long association with the coal industry ended in May 2006. He sold his coal washing and processing business, A Ogden & Sons, for £24.5m. But he still has a number of property businesses and assets which underwrite his twin passions – horseflesh and his charitable work, for which he was knighted in 2001.
He has 30 National Hunt horses in training.
But there is another side to Ogden: he gives university scholarships to disadvantaged youngsters from Yorkshire’s pit villages.
Ogden himself knows all about lack of advantage. The son of a builder, he was the eldest of six children and was sent to work on a farm at 15.
After national service, he used his army gratuity to set up a company supplying quarrying material for laying roads to isolated farmsteads. He later went into the site clearance and demolition business before branching out into property.
An early investor in London’s Docklands when almost no-one would touch it, he made his fortune when prices shot up. He also saw the potential in slag heaps, extracting coal and redeveloping the land for recreational use.
Seventy-one-year-old Ogden now runs a number of companies from his Yorkshire base. His two main remaining companies – Ogden Properties and Nevison Properties – had £49m net assets between them in 2005.
But with many other private interests and the fine collection of horses, Ogden is easily worth a very conservative £135m.
173 £132m
Martin Birrane
Peer Group
Martin Birrane will not be happy with planners in Kent, who have twice turned down his plans for a site near Sevenoaks. Still, he will be happy enough with his other business ventures, particularly the success of A1 Grand Prix.
The rival series to the official Formula 1 has been described as the World Cup of motor racing and the most important development in motorsport in the past half-century. Birrane’s Lola operation has provided around 60 identical cars for the A1 series, so he has a lot riding on its success.
Knowing a thing or two about racing cars has helped Birrane, who has 47 wins under his belt as a saloon car racer. In 1997, he was able to buy Lola Cars, maker of many famous racing cars, from the receiver and to turn it round.
An Irish property magnate from Co Mayo, Birrane travelled the world after school before marrying at 22 and emigrating to Canada. His wife did not like the country, though he developed a taste for real estate there. He returned to the UK and started racing as well as dealing in property.
The 1970s were a difficult time but he survived, and his Peer Group is doing well in the booming property market, showing around £103m of net assets in its latest 2005-06 accounts.
He has pumped around £20m into Lola and diversified into new areas. It is coming good and in 2005-06 made an £831,000 profit on £24.8m sales. It should still be worth at least the £20m Birrane has put into it.
He also owns the Mondello Park racing track in Co Kildare. With other interests and assets, Birrane is worth £132m.
174 £130m
Michael Cotter & Family
Park Developments (Dublin)
Michael Cotter is one of Dublin’s leading developers. He and his wife Angela are listed as directors for over 70 companies he is active all over the Dublin area, particularly with housing and office schemes and he was recently given the go-ahead to build 1,100 new homes in a Dublin development.
Cotter purchased Glencairn House, the former British ambassador’s home in Sandyford, for over £20m in 1999. He also built one of Ireland’s first £1m houses at Carrickmines Wood.
Cotter, 66, is part of the urban capital consortium that won the competition to develop Carlisle Pier in Dun Laoghaire. This will include a National Maritime Life Centre, a 127-bedroom hotel, 229 apartments, retail, leisure uses and a floating stage.
He has developed Fashion City, thus relocating many of Ireland’s fashion wholesalers to west Dublin, and bought 19 acres from the Religious Sisters of Charity in Milltown for £8m, building 700 apartments on the site.
Cotter also developed North West Business Park near Blanchardstown on nearly 200 acres, and owns land near Finglas and Dublin airport. He sold the first phase of The Park retail park scheme in Carrickmines in early 2006 to Warren Private Clients for €100m.
Park is involved in residential development and also has an extensive industrial property portfolio. In 2005, the company made a £2.9m profit on £58m sales. It has £48.8m net assets but we can see at least a dozen more Cotter firms, which take the net asset figure to around £130m. We value the Cotter family at that level.
174 £130m
Cyril Dennis & Family
Rumford Investments
Cyril Dennis saw the huge potential for a property market to grow out of London’s Docklands and he is still making money out of the area more than two decades later.
He sold a 3.3-acre site on the Isle of Dogs for £47m in September 2006. Nine years previously, he had bought the site for just £2m.
Dennis has also secured approval for development at Peruvian Wharf in the Docklands at the fourth attempt. He has owned the site since 1999.
A £67m development in Liverpool was also completed in 2006 by the 63-year-old.
He began his development work as the half-owner of an Essex housebuilder, which he sold in 1987. After a spell advising the Berisford group, he built up his own property business with a portfolio spread across the UK.
In 1994, Dennis sold 75% of the portfolio to Legal & General for £116m, netting a profit of £50m.
Today, we can see around 45 small companies, including Rumford Investments, held by the Dennis family and trusts. There are around £50m of net assets in them.With the developments in the pipeline and the profit from the Isle of Dogs sale, we raise the Dennis family to £130m.
174 £130m
Bill Gredley & Family
Unex Corporation
Bill Gredley’s sheer durability in British racing means that his silks – yellow, black and yellow striped sleeves, white cap – are among the most familiar on the turf, and were carried to victory in both the Oaks and St Leger by his famous horse User Friendly.
The Derby, though, has proved a much more difficult puzzle to crack. His most recent runner, Chancellor, was 10th of 12 in 2001, while Environment Friend was 11th of 13 in 1991. “Of course, it’s the race I’d love to win,” Gredley says. He has been to New Zealand seeking new horses for his stud operation, paying £138,000 for one filly in February 2006.
Gredley, 74, is also a shrewd property developer. In 2004-05, he reorganised his interests with a new parent company, Unex Group Holdings, which showed a £5.9m profit on £9m sales in 2005-06, when it had £114.6m net assets. His racing interests, a £13m dividend in 2002-03 and other assets take Gredley and his family to £130m after tax.
174 £130m
Sir Tom Farmer
Morston Assets
A moderate 2006-07 season for Hibernian Football Club, the Edinburgh premier league team, will not please Sir Tom Farmer. But Farmer, 67, who owns nearly 90% of Hibs through his HFC Holdings company, will be pleased with the financial turnround at Easter Road.
In 2004-05, Hibs made a profit of £65,000 on a £7.2m turnover, the first profit since 1998. Hibs also pared back its debts early in 2005 with the sale of a car park to a developer. As chief benefactor, Farmer wrote off £6m of the club’s debt he had given the club an interest-free loan of £5m in 1999.
Aside from football, Farmer is now heavily involved in charitable work round the world and in Scotland. But he has not neglected business and recently sold choice Edinburgh properties for £2.4m. He also topped up his stake to £2m in MyTravel, the recovering travel group. But it is tyres that made Edinburgh-based Farmer his first fortune.
He started the Kwik-Fit chain in 1971, selling it to Ford in 1999 for £1bn. Farmer netted £78m for his stake. In 2002, Ford sold it to a venture capital group for a miserable £330m, Farmer having turned down the opportunity to buy it back. But in June 2005, it was sold by its CVC backers in an £800m deal, which must have caused Farmer a few regrets. However, he was savvy enough to retain the freeholds on many Kwik-Fit properties, generating £1m a year in rents.
Meanwhile, his development activities continue apace. He is developing a £150m industrial park in Staffordshire and has built a 125-acre business park near Edinburgh. In all, Farmer is reckoned to have £850m-worth of developments in the pipeline. We can see a half-dozen small property companies controlled by him or his trusts, with around £15m of net assets. Norfolk-based Morston Securities is the most successful, posting 2005-06 profits of £5.6m on turnover up from £3.5m to £12.7m.
Farmer also made around £8.5m by selling a stake in KBC Holdings, a managed office business. In all, Farmer should now easily be worth £130m.
