27 Peter Green & family
£725m
Luscar
The recent sale of a 24.8% stake in luxury hotel group Maybourne netted around £75m for the Green family, treble its initial investment. Green had previously made serious money from investing in the Savoy Group in 2004.
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 Mitchel in the mid-1970s. Her father died in 1983 and seven years later she died, aged 38, of cancer.
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, were sold in a £300m deal.
The Green family invested around 10% of their proceeds in a new Luscar company, which itself was taken over in 2001 in a £600m deal, netting the Green family perhaps £50m. In addition in 1996, the Green family also made a £60m profit from selling its stake in a small energy company.
But the family properties in Bermuda, London and the like, plus remaining assets in Canada and the profits from his London hotel deals, keep Green at £725m.
28 Peter Jones & family
£720m
Emerson Developments (Holdings)
Emerson bought a wildlife habitat from the RSPCA for a mere £295,000 in April this year. The land, in Alderley Edge, Cheshire, was left by a man called David Brown who had left a “wish” in his will that the land remain an animal sanctuary, rather than making it a legal condition of the will.
However, the RSPCA promptly ignored that wish and sold the land to Peter Jones’ group for development. Emerson Developments, the Alderley Edge-based company, was started by Jones, a former joiner, who moved into housebuilding in Cheshire way back in 1959.
He was one of the first developers to spot the development potential of south Manchester and bought up tracts of land cheaply. Jones has never looked back and since then has taken his development work overseas.
In 2010-11 Emerson made a £17.3m profit on £157.2m sales and is worth its £650m net assets. Jones’ other company, P E Jones (Properties), had £50.3m of net assets in the same period. Jones and family trusts own them both. We value the businesses at £700m, and add £20m for other assets and property.
29 Chris Lazari
£712m
Lazari Investments
Sound strategic thinking has helped Chris Lazari’s blue-chip London-based portfolio ride the property market well in the last year.
His company, Lazari Investments, saw its profits rise from £42m to £62.5m in 2011-12, with net assets coming in at nearly £642m.
The group’s portfolio, 91% of which is in the West End and the rest in north London, consists of 131 buildings and 430 separate tenants.
Lazari also had a successful year of lettings with rental income up 2.5% to almost £77m. The group let close to 84,000 sq ft in 20 separate deals during 2011-12. Lazari also won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Props lunch in May this year. He said he hoped to be able to continue for “another 50 years”.
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.
Cautiously though, in the current economic climate, we value the Lazari property interests on the latest net asset figure. We add another £70m to his portfolio for cash and personal property, taking Lazari to £712m.
30 Prince Charles
£710m
Duchy of Cornwall
Prince Charles finished paying off a £20m loan in May this year which he took out in 2007 to save Dumfries House for the nation.
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 2010-11, it produced a surplus of £17.8m, a rise of 3.7%. While rental income was broadly flat, investment income helped the rise in the surplus. Rising agricultural land prices helped push the net assets up sharply to nearly £697m.
We value the Duchy on its net asset figure, and Prince Charles in his capacity as steward of those assets, at £710m with personal assets added.
Aside from his work as heir to the throne, Prince Charles 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 about architecture, the environment and town planning.
31= Richard Caring
£700m
International Clothing Designs (Holdings)
Richard Caring’s 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 profit of £9.7m on £60.7m sales in 2010-11.
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. Caring 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 2010-11, profits at the company came in at £111,000 on £43.5m sales. But this is but a fraction of the total.
Its accounts are offshore and the nearest Caring admits to 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. He also seems to have made a healthy £83m profit from the 2007 sales of the Bierodrome and Strada restaurant chains and, more recently, from the trendy Soho House operation. He bought an 80% stake there in 2008 for £105m. In January, he reduced that stake to 30% as Soho House was taken over in a deal reported at £240m. That followed on from his £90m purchase of the upmarket Annabel’s nightclub from the late Mark Birley in 2007.
Caring’s love of up-market restaurants, exclusive watering holes and the like takes him easily to £700m.
31= Jim Mellon
£700m
Regent Pacific Corporate Finance
Millionaire investor Jim Mellon has invested heavily in German property and around 70% of his wealth is tied up in some 40,000 apartments there. 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 is also investing in the biotech industry in America. He has stakes of around £18m in a number of quoted companies we can see. Isle of Man-based Mellon is one of the island’s biggest property owners. He has two homes there, four other homes round Europe and several properties in Ibiza. His Hong Kong-listed company, Regent Pacific, is cash-rich with its main investments in China and commodities, particularly uranium.
In June 2012, however, Regent Pacific issued a warning to shareholders and potential investors to exercise caution when dealing in the company’s shares. It expected the group would show a “significant decline” in the previous six months’ performance when compared with the same period in 2011.
Nevertheless, Mellon is still easily worth £700m.
33 Sir Donald Gordon & family
£690m
Liberty International Holdings
The demerger of quoted property group Liberty International into two separate groups leaves Sir Donald Gordon and his family with big stakes in the two new companies, Capital & Counties Properties and Capital Shopping Centres. CSC is chaired by John Whittaker, and between him and Gordon they control 30% of the company. Capital & Counties had a productive year in 2011, achieving a total property return of 14.8% and a total shareholder return of 23.6%.
Gordon 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 £570m. South African share sales and other assets add around £150m. But hefty charitable donations cut the Gordon family back to £690m.
34 John Christodoulou
£670m
Yianis Holdings
A property entrepreneur, John Christodoulou left Cyprus for London after the 1974 Turkish invasion. Leaving school at 16, he trained as a diamond mounter and bought his first property in 1994. His Yianis Holdings operation showed £216m net assets in 2010-11. It is the second largest freeholder at Canary Wharf with 2m sq ft, including two luxury hotels.
Christodoulou also has 2,000 residential and commercial freehold units in Central London. Other interests include Brazilian land, New York apartments, Manchester’s Hilton Tower and the Liverpool Radisson Blue hotels.
Monaco-based since 2007, Christodoulou has business assets of £500m. Personal assets add £170m.
35 Marcus Evans
£625m
Marcus Evans Group
Marcus Evans is an unlikely Tractor Boy. The reclusive tycoon completed his takeover of Ipswich Town for £44m in 2007. Evans sacked ex-Manchester United legend Roy Keane as manager in January 2011 and the Tractor Boys ended the 2010-11 campaign at 13th in the Championship.
Evans’ fortune comes from the Marcus Evans Group, founded in 1983, which is a conference, events, in-company training, sports hospitality and online information operation.
The group recently added television production to its extensive portfolio of interests when it acquired independent company World Productions, the team behind This Life and United, early in 2012.
In 2011 it made around £35m and is worth £400m. We add another £225m for property and other assets, taking Evans to £625m.
36 The Duke of Bedford
£600m
Woburn Abbey
A new £200m Center Parcs holiday village on Bedford’s Woburn estate is on course for a spring 2014 opening. It is expected to add 25% to Center Parcs’ group profits and create 2,000 jobs.
The Harrow and Harvard-educated Duke of Bedford is well versed in the hospitality trade, running the extraordinary 13,000-acre 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 £10.7m net assets in the 2011 accounts of three family companies, including Woburn Enterprises. The house and grounds must easily be worth £150m.
The art treasures inside, including 24 Canalettos, and a recently identified Rembrandt, should be worth £400m, but we halve that to £200m to allow for any tax in the event of a sale.
Estates Gazette put a £250m price tag on Bedford’s London estate consisting of 180 buildings in Bloomsbury. We raise Bedford to £600m this year.
37 Trevor Hemmings
£575m
Northern Trust Group
Leisure tycoon Trevor Hemmings has two passions: football and racing. His horse, Ballabriggs, won the 2011 Aintree Grand National, his second triumph in the great race. Hemmings has also agreed to sell his stake in Arena Leisure, which runs racecourses, and will pick up £70m.
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 per cent stake in North End, loaned the struggling football club £200,000 through his Guild Ventures investment group.
Hemmings has the cash, having sold the famous Blackpool Tower to the local council for around £40m recently.
He started out as a bricklayer’s apprentice locally in Leyland. Later, he built his own housebuilding firm and sold it 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. After taking over the business he sold it in 1989 for a hefty profit. In 2000 he bought Littlewoods’ pools operation from the Moores family for £161m.
His main holdings company, the Northern Trust Group, had £110m net assets in 2010-11. His pub company, Trust Inns, has £93.4m net assets while we can see £47m of stakes in quoted companies. Hemmings is now easily worth £575m.
38 Lloyd Dorfman
£570m
Travelex Holdings
Lloyd Dorfman’s Esselco Properties saw a strong improvement in 2011 with £4.2m profit on £13.2m sales. It also showed more than £69m net assets. In 2010 Dorfman had funded the £43.3m purchase of the rival Office Group.
He could afford it: a reluctant merchant banker, he started the Travelex foreign exchange operation in 1976, armed with a £25,000 loan from a friend and a central London office.
In 2006 Travelex was taken over by venture capital group, Apax Partners, in a £1.06bn deal and Dorfman netted £240m for selling part of his stake.
In July 2011 the company wiped out its debt by selling its business payments division to Western Union for £606m. Dorfman retains a 28% stake which should be worth £400m on the back of £160m profit in 2011. In all, he should still be worth around £570m after tax.
39 Freddie Linnett & The Murphy Family
£550m
Charles Street Buildings (Leicester)
Profits at Charles Street Buildings (Leicester) rose from £30.7m to £32.5m on £38.8m sales in the year to November 2011.
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 £524.5m net assets. Other assets and nearly £94m of dividends from 1995 to 2010 inclusive, take Linnett and the Leicester-based Murphy family to £550m after tax.
40 David Ross
£540m
Kandahar
David 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 £243m. He also sold £104m worth of Carphone shares after the float and £30m of TalkTalk shares recently.
Ross was born into a very wealthy family. His grandfather founded one of the largest fisheries and frozen foods business in the UK, the Ross frozen foods brand. Ross invested heavily in property through a joint venture with the investment bank, Morgan Stanley. He injected his property interests, held through Kandahar, into the venture.
He fell foul of the Stock Exchange in 2008 when it was revealed that he had been pledging his shares in Carphone Warehouse and other companies to the bank as security for personal loans, although the SE cleared him of any wrongdoing, admitting that its own rules were not clear enough.
Though hit by the property downturn, Ross’s property assets are worth £55m, net of mortgages. Other assets and investments take him to £540m.
41 Simon Nixon
£534m
Moneysupermarket.com
Simon Nixon is working hard on simonescapes.com, his portfolio of luxury holiday homes for rental. A Cornwall beach house has currently been completed, and a new build on Lake Windermere will be finished in Spring 2013 as well as a couple of villas in Barbados.
He co-founded the moneysupermarket.com comparison site in 1999, after dropping out of university to work as a financial adviser. The north Wales-based company proved a phenomenal success, floating on the stock market in 2007.
Moneysupermarket.com is clearly still booming as it announced earlier in the year that it intended to double the size of its London offices by the end of this year. It currently occupies 6,500 sq ft over three floors in Great Titchfield Street but is now looking for 15,000 sq ft across one floor.
The price comparison website recorded £181m sales in 2011, representing a 22% increase on the previous year. Nixon, who still works part-time at moneysupermarket.com on product development, has a £334m stake.
Share sales at the float of £105m, property and past dividends take Nixon to £534m after tax.
42= The Clarke Family
£500m
C Le Masurier
Jersey developer C Le Masurier was granted planning permission for a £150m office development in January. The J1 scheme in the centre of the financial district is Jersey’s largest private development. Significantly, it will be entirely self-funded by C Le Masurier. The project aims to create “the greenest and most sustainable” office building in the Channel islands with a BREEAM rating of “very good”.
The company, owned by the Clarke family, 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 in 2001 of patriarch Fred Clarke led to a major refocusing of this secretive family business. We raise the Clarke family fortune to £500m on the back of the Jersey development.
42= Nathan Kirsh
£500m
Kirsh Investments (UK)
The landmark London skyscraper, Tower 42, EC2, (formerly the NatWest Tower) in the City, has been snapped up for £282.5m by a South African business magnate, who holds a Swazi passport. But the low-key Nathan Kirsh is now becoming more active in Britain and he has residency status both here and in America.
Often described in print as a billionaire, Kirsh has a huge property empire spanning the UK, Australia and Swaziland. He sold a 30% stake in the British property company Minerva for £50m last August and also owns the huge Jetro cash and carry business in America.
In Israel he is best known for his 24% stake in the defence company Magal Security Systems, chief supplier of the controversial security fence project on the west bank. The company has come under criticism from NGO bodies as the result of its involvement in constructing the fence which the International Court of Justice declared illegal in July 2004.
A huge benefactor to charities and in helping business start-ups, Kirsh is easily worth £500m as a sighting shot.
42= Leo Noé & family
£500m
Agra
Last year, a wealth of £500m gave Leo Noé 34th position in the Rich List, but holding the same fortunes this year has seen him relegated by eight places. Not that this should cause him any concern. F&C Reit Asset Management, the result of a merger between his company REIT and F&C Asset Management, revealed in July this year that it is to buy the Lanes shopping centre in Carlisle, Cumbria, from Aviva Investors for around £65m. This represents a 7.5% yield for the 465,000 sq ft mall.
Noé, one of the shrewdest property men in Britain, sold his British Israel Investments property operation in 2011. He should have picked up around £160m for his stake. There are a further £127m of net assets in the 2010 accounts of companies owned by the Noé family, such as Agra and Landmaster Properties.
Past property deals have boosted the Noé wealth: in 2005 he bought a retail park for £307m, only to sell it a year later for £360m. In 2004 it sold three shopping centres in the north for £378.5m, which it had bought in 2002-03 for £294m. In all, we value the Noé family at £500m.
45 Ronald Hobson
£480m
Consolidated Property Investments
Ronald Hobson’s former company, Consolidated Property Investments, currently has a significant development programme valued at £100m, with projects due to be completed in 2013 and 2014.
Hobson originally teamed up with Sir Donald Gosling 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. 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 stakes in some property companies, including 50% of a £30m operation called Hildane Properties, which produced some fine results in 2010-11 with an £8.6m profit on £12.9m sales and net assets up £10m at £16.8m.
But huge dividends from National Parking before its sale, plus the recent property company sales, take Hobson to £480m this year.
46= £460m
Caspar MacDonald-Hall
London & Cambridge Properties
It seems that wildlife has caused greater problems than any recession to Caspar MacDonald-Hall this year. The construction of more than 300 homes on land in Pensnett, Dudley, was halted in June due to nesting lapwings on the site.
London & Cambridge Properties, which was waiting for the birds to fly the nest, is working with Taylor Wimpey West Midlands on the multi-million pound housing development scheme.
London & Cambridge Properties, one of Britain’s largest private property firms, saw its net assets rise from nearly £499m to £541.5m in 2010-11 when it made a healthy £34.2m profit on £87.3m sales.
The Midlands-based company is a leading developer of industrial estates. MacDonald-Hall has a 40% stake there. We can also see another £211m of net assets attributable to Macdonald-Hall and his family in four other separate companies, including Proudreed, a Southampton property investor. Macdonald-Hall also has a £4m stake in AIM, an aviation group.
In all, with past dividends, he should be worth £460m. With an increased value of over £100m compared with last year, MacDonald-Hall now sits comfortably among the top 50 richest property magnates.
46= Steve Morgan
£460m
Redrow
Steve Morgan upped his stake in the Redrow developer to 40.4% in May after shareholders failed to take up the majority of the firm’s £80m share placing. He also tabled a bid – recently temporarily withdrawn – to take the firm private by buying out other shareholders in a deal which would value the company at £610m.
Morgan, who also chairs Wolves, the Championship football club, started Flintshire-based Redrow in 1974 and 20 years later, as one of the biggest housebuilders in Britain, it was floated on the stock market.
Morgan sold £240m worth of shares in the float and 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. Morgan also recently shared £75m sale proceeds on a Spanish development.
In March 2009 Morgan returned to Redrow as chairman and his stake is now worth £235m. Allowing for reinvestment of his share sale proceeds, Morgan is worth perhaps £460m after tax.
48 Sir Donald Gosling
£450m
Consolidated Property Investments
Sir Donald Gosling offered the Queen use of his £51m yacht Leander for this year’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations. The Royal Yacht Britannia was retired in 1997 so the Queen waved to crowds from the 246ft Leander as it led a 1,000-strong flotilla on the River Thames.
The navy and the sea are consuming passions for Gosling. He is president of the White Ensign Association, the naval charity. Leander was named after HMS Leander, in which Gosling served as a signalman after the war. Gosling is one half of the duo that made a fortune from car parks.
With partner Ronald Hobson, he started 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. They have had hefty dividends over the years.
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. Gosling and Hobson still have three small property companies with £21m net assets between them.
With £94.5m net assets and after hefty charitable donations to the Gosling Foundation, Gosling should be worth at least £450m.
49 Lord Robert Edmiston
£440m
IM Properties
Warwickshire-based IM Properties saw profits for 2011 rise 112% to £31m. The company, which is chaired by motor trade entrepreneur Bob Edmiston, saw rental income increase in the year by 4% to £38.9m, while occupancy levels were maintained at 96% across its portfolio.
Key investments during the year included the purchase of a newly developed supermarket in Vernon Hills, Chicago, let to grocery chain Roundy’s Supermarkets. IM Properties’ luxury residential arm, Spitfire Properties, also marked its first full year of trading in 2011 and experienced strong sales success at its niche development at Chalgrove in Oxfordshire.
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 2011, IM Group (parent of IM Properties) made £41.3m profit on £347m sales.
We value the overall business on its £440m net asset figures. Since 1998 Edmiston has had nearly £79m in salaries from IM Group, but he has given over £120m to charity. We value him at £440m.
50 Anthony Lyons
£425m
St James Capital
Anthony Lyons’ Matterhorn Capital Leisure put three late-night venues across England up for sale in February this year. The sales include Tom Peppers, a seafront bar in Essex, as well as a nightclub in Loughborough and Peterborough. If they all sell, Matterhorn will net just under £3m.
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 in north London. Other key investments have been sold in a deal spree worth £1bn. It was in 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.
He has invested heavily in Data Centres and completed two purchases, which have an estimated end value of £400m.
With the deal flurry, we value Lyons at £425m now.
