In this, the second Estates Gazette Rich List of property’s wealthiest, we have expanded the number of entries from 200 to 333.
It wasn’t hard to find yet more people in Britain who have made their fortunes in real estate – it remains the country’s richest sector and the 333 here have a combined wealth of more than £47bn. This is an average £140m each, though about 10% of the lot is still owned by one man – the fabulously rich Duke of Westminster.
Investing for the long-term while constantly managing and refreshing portfolios has been a successful formula for many of the entrepreneurs here, not just the 67 who, like the Duke, originally inherited their wealth. Others have made their millions by building up property companies and successfully selling them on at the right point in the cycle, often to start again with new ventures.
The top 10 has changed slightly since last time. Four inherited their billion or more, but six are entrepreneurs who understood the value of property from the beginning of their business careers. The Reuben and Barclay brothers are still up there, as is Sir Alan Sugar, and they are joined for the first time by John Whittaker, Mark Pears and Donny Gordon.
The Rules of Engagement on the back page explain how people were selected for inclusion.
As well as property’s household names, there are plenty of fascinating new ones. Some we have added as a result of feedback you gave us last time. Others make it in 2004 because we have lowered the bar from £20m to £10m.
We hope you find it useful. Keep the feedback coming after you have enjoyed reading it.
The Duke of Westminster
Grosvenor Group
Plans for a £40m apartment complex in Sydney, following on from a huge Hong Kong development, show that Grosvenor Group is truly making itself felt on a global stage. But the group, owned by the family trusts of the Duke or Westminster, is not neglecting his home patch.
Last year, plans for one of Bath’s biggest ever developments were unveiled. Grosvenor will start work on Western Riverside by the end of 2006 and it will take 15-20 years to complete. Taking such a long view has, of course, helped Gerald Grosvenor to become the richest person in property and, but for Roman Abramovich choosing Britain as his adopted home, he would be number one in the whole country.
The range of his wealth is staggering, taking in vast estates in Lancashire and Cheshire, great swathes of central London in Mayfair and Belgravia, and tracts of land in Scotland, Canada and around the world. Grosvenor, his main property company, saw its profits fall to £60.8m on £268.7m sales in 2002. But its net assets rose to £1.75bn. The 2003 accounts have yet to be filed but the company has revealed to Estates Gazette that profits rose 50% to £91.7m. Yet Grosvenor is but a fraction of Westminster’s wealth – some 200 acres of Belgravia are held in separate trusts – and when everything is included, the value of the family fortune comes to £5.2bn.
The duke is never happier than when at home at Eaton Hall near Chester with his young family, or with the men from his local Territorial Army unit. Indeed, he has carved out a second, alternative career, rising to become the TA’s first major general.
He’s a tough businessman, as tenants in London have found during rent negotiations with his companies. Neither has he sat on his legacy and just taken the money: he’s expanded the family empire. Aside from Bath and recent overseas work, he is behind the enormous Paradise Street development in Liverpool, which includes three new department stores, two hotels, a new bus station and car parking for 3,000 vehicles. And he’s involved in a huge project on the South Atlantic island of St Helena.
The duke guards his privacy. He’s 52, lives with his wife Natalia and has four children, Tamara, Edwina, Hugh and Viola. He was sent away as a boarder from seven and spent his time wondering why his parents hated him so much – he has made a point since of sending his own children to Cheshire day schools. Similarly, he replaced the “huge Victorian pile” of a family seat with “something more in keeping with what one wants to live in”. It’s not as big and, as he points out, “the roof doesn’t leak”.
David & Simon Reuben
Trans-World Metals
The £27m they recently spent on London office building Carlton House, was mere loose change for the Reuben brothers. David, 66, and Simon, 63, have put their slide rules to good use elsewhere this year. £146m has been invested in Elliott Bernerd’s (61) buyout of Chelsfield, with another £310m put in a retail property portfolio with Tom Hunter (20). The brothers have acquired a majority stake in the ERMEWA rail group and stakes in a number of smaller property companies.
The Reubens have also been involved in a joint bid worth up to £350m for parts of the Queens Moat Houses hotel operation. They have been underbidders on a number of occasions, for Selfridges and the Scottish & Newcastle pubs, showing that they will not overpay.
Born in Bombay, the Reubens made their way to London, where Simon went into property and David started trading in scrap metal. Our sources suggest that their assets are now over £2bn, with half in their growing investment portfolio. We add another £100m this year for the return on their cash and liquid investments, taking the Reuben brothers to £2.2bn.
Earl Cadogan
The Cadogan Group
A new 900-seater concert hall has emerged from a former Christian Science Church in exclusive Sloane Terrace, SW1. It is likely to be the home of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and it is the latest project in the remarkable transformation of Chelsea by Cadogan.
Having inherited the title from his late father in 1997, Earl Cadogan, now 67, has presided over a hefty investment programme covering the 90-acre estate. Some £60m has been spent in the past 18 months alone. The crowning glory is the £150m redevelopment of the old barracks and sports ground at Duke of York Square on fashionable Kings Road.
The family company Cadogan Group showed around £1.3bn net assets in its 2003 accounts. Estates, past dividends and personal property take the family to perhaps £1.55bn.
The Hon Mary Czernin & the Howard de Walden family
Howard de Walden Estates
Marylebone is booming. “We’ve had a very good year and Welbeck Land has done very well also.” Our source at Howard de Walden Estates was not wrong. In 2002/03, the two companies owned by the De Walden family together made £34.4m profit on £56.2m sales. It is good news for the family, which is represented in this list by Czernin, 69, the eldest of four daughters of the late Lord Howard de Walden, who died in 1999.
The family has allowed professional managers, under the stewardship of Andrew Ashenden – a man with huge vision – to get on with regenerating large swathes of central London that only 10 years ago would have been considered problematic. It has paid dividends. Marylebone High Street is now recognised as a model for high streets throughout Britain, having been developed with great care for the cultural and social needs of the area. The company is a great (if low-key) patron to the arts, supporting institutions such as the Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and we have noted various philanthropic gestures.
Marylebone is now being seen as the new Notting Hill and, although one of the De Walden family laughed at our £1.15bn valuation last year, we reckon that was more in embarrassment than anything else. Though much of the estate is held in family trusts, increased property values and the sparkling figures in 2002/03 lead us to up our valuation to £1.2bn. We add another £100m for other assets, including more than £58m in dividends from 1993-2003 inclusive.
Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay
Ellerman Investments
The new proprietors of the Telegraph newspapers, 70-year-old twins Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay, won control of the titles in June this year with a £665m bid. Yet newspapers are but a small part of the Barclays’ operations. Born in London near Olympia, they had a tough childhood (their father died when they were 12) and left school at 16 to become painters and decorators. Property deals in the 1960s made them seriously rich.
Within a decade in business they owned a number of trophy assets including the Londonderry House hotel, the Cadogan hotel and two in Bayswater. They moved out of property into pubs and shipping, picking up assets cheaply and selling them on at hefty profit. In 1983, for example, they bought the Ellerman Group for £45m and five years later sold its brewing division for £320m.
Aside from the Telegraph, they also own The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday and The Business. They branched out into mail order and retailing with the £750m purchase of Littlewoods in 2002 and the home shopping business of GUS for £590m in 2003. They backed the break up of Sears in 1999 by retail king Philip Green, and Sears is still in their empire but is a property management business (hence their place in this list) with £413.8m of assets. In all their various businesses, while having a patchy profit record, clock up annual sales of £3.7bn.
The twins were reckoned to be worth £1.2bn by advisers to Hollinger, the Telegraph owner, during the bid battle, after due diligence was carried out on their finances. We see no reason to disagree, even though this is much higher than our valuation last year. If they can return the Telegraph to its former glory, they will surely get much richer.
Viscount Portman
Portman Estate
A better fix on the value of the Portman Estate should emerge from the recent appointment of Chesterton on a three-year contract to value the entire 2m sq ft portfolio in 1,450 properties. The decision to bring in Chesterton marks chief executive Hugh Seaborn’s efforts to reposition the company as an active property manager.
Another sign of the progress being made is the new name of Portman Village for two shopping streets in the heart of the 110-acre estate in central London. It is key to the estate’s gradual move upmarket, which began when Portman, now 46, became the 10th viscount in 1999. Owned by a series of complex family trusts, the Portman Estate was slower than the other big London landowners to start improvements. The problem was that many of the 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, where there are proposals for a farm shop to be supplied from Portman’s Herefordshire estate. The estate also owns the freehold of Marks & Spencer’s proposed 650,000 sq ft redevelopment of its Baker Street headquarters.
There are few signs of family wealth in their two companies, Brickleton Group and Portman Settled Estates, with £5m net assets between them. But while central London prices rose sharply this year, we only add 15% to our valuation, taking the 110 acres to £1.15bn. We add another £50m for family assets including the Herefordshire estate, a holiday home in Antigua and Portman’s Sydney mansion.
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|
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|
No |
Name |
Wealth (£m) |
|
1 |
Duke of Westminster |
5,200 |
|
2 |
David & Simon Reuben |
2,200 |
|
3 |
Earl Cadogan |
1,550 |
|
4 |
The Hon Mary Czernin & the Howard de Walden family |
1,300 |
|
5 |
Viscount Portman |
1,200 |
|
8 |
Mark Pears |
800 |
|
9 |
Donald Gordon |
750 |
|
10 |
Sir Alan Sugar |
703 |
|
13 |
David Khalili |
600 |
|
13 |
Paul Raymond |
600 |
John Whittaker
Peel Holdings
The low-key Peel Holdings will become even more low-key. The Manchester-based group, which has grown from a £2m cash shell into a £1.27bn property giant under John Whittaker, is to be taken private. Whittaker, with over 68% of the shares, and his ally the Saudi Olayan dynasty, with 25%, are backing the privatisation, so it is inevitable.
Whittaker, 62, is perhaps Britain’s most stubborn property developer. In the 1980s, he fought a long drawn out and sometimes bitter battle to take over the Manchester Ship Canal Company. It owned the land on which his hugely successful out-of-town shopping complex, the Trafford Centre, is built. Now in its sixth year, the centre is the flagship of Whittaker’s empire, which also embraces Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport and a ports division operating the Manchester Ship Canal and Clydeport, with four ports on Scotland’s west coast.
Whittaker nearly became a Catholic priest, but went into the quarrying business, before moving into property. His stake in Peel at the takeover price is worth £879m. His other assets – including an Isle of Man home, another in Spain and £6m in dividends each year – should easily take Whittaker to £929m.
Mark Pears
William Pears Family Holdings
Mark Pears is a pub landlord courtesy of a £57m deal in December when William Pears Family Holdings went into partnership to buy 252 pubs from Punch Taverns. Property is the usual fare of Pears and his brothers, who head a property empire started by grandfather William, that now embraces thousands of London homes and office blocks. The three young Pears were propelled to the top when their father and ace dealmaker, Clive, died in his early 50s.
Mark, 41, is managing director of William Pears Family Holdings, but there are at least 27 separate companies, which made in total £59.9m profit in 2002/03. They also showed net assets of £438m. The Pears family is not short of a bob or two, with dividends of £10m last year and nearly £82m in 1996.
The brothers have formed a joint venture with Land Securities, which bought BT’s property portfolio for £2.3bn in 2001. They are already looking at converting old telephone exchanges in the City into luxury flats. This has given the brothers an appetite for similar deals, and they are working with west London NHS trusts to develop healthcare facilities. The increased profits we can see and the new deals lead us to push the Pears up to £800m.
Donald Gordon
Liberty International
“I’m hoping I can switch the focus I’ve put on business into opera. I want it to be the focus of my life,” says Donald Gordon. If that is the case, then opera in the UK should be set for a golden age. South African-born Gordon, now based in London, has recently shown what is to come. He promised £10m to the Royal Opera House and a further £10m to the Wales Millennium Centre.
When he will be fully engrossing himself in opera is still not clear. He says he will step down no later than his 75th birthday in June next year. But for now, Gordon is devoted to his property group Liberty International, “the company I love”. Gordon started South African insurance operation Liberty Life in the 1950s but has focused on British property through Liberty International since 1980. He finally sold out of the South African group in 1999.
His family stake in Liberty International, best known for shopping centres such as Lakeside in Essex, is up sharply and is now worth £552m. His South African share sales and other assets take him to around £770m, but we lop £20m off for those generous charitable donations.
Sir Alan Sugar
Amstrad and Amsprop
We’re all about to get to know Sir Alan Sugar a lot better. The 57-year-old Brentwood tycoon is to front The Apprentice, a reality TV show imported from America. Sugar will set 12 budding entrepreneurs gruelling tasks and then humiliate them until only a dynamo scoops the top prize. Sugar’s expletives will no doubt come into play and he will find time to sound off about the City.
As ever, he is seething about the City’s reaction to his latest gadget – the e-m@iler – a screen phone with e-mail. In February, the abrasive entrepreneur revealed that the e-m@iler, now used by 1m people, had made £1m profit for his Amstrad operation in the first half of 2003/04, following a £5.5m loss last year. For Sugar – a Hackney tailor’s son who drives a Rolls-Royce with personalised numberplates – it was further proof that his gut instinct sees him right, rather than the City analysts he regularly derides.
Best known for building Amstrad into a leading consumer electronics group selling phones and computers in the 1980s and 1990s, Sugar now has several interests. His £41m stake in Amstrad is held via his personal Amshold Group, which also owns the £85m Viglen computer operation. But the former Spurs chairman has another £427m-worth of property held either via Amshold or overseas. In addition he has £150m of cash, and personal assets including property in London, Florida and Spain, taking him to £703m. Property deals in the past year include letting Amsprop’s refurbishment at 17-18 Dover Street, W1, to fashion retailer Commes des Garcons.
He won’t be too concerned then about his fee for The Apprentice.
Trevor Hemmings
TJH Group
Lancashire almost didn’t get Trevor Hemmings. He was born in London, but brought north by his parents in the wartime evacuation and he’s stayed ever since. More than that, he loves the place and has never thought, despite his many millions, of leaving.
In many respects, he is Mr Lancashire, owning Blackpool Tower, Littlewoods pools, hotels, pubs and holiday camps. The former brickie from Leyland now has houses abroad and a stud in Ireland, but “home” is still beside the M6 in Chorley – except that these days he lives in 200 acres where he keeps racehorses. Even at 69, his ambition is undimmed. If things go to plan, he will transform Blackpool into a Las Vegas-style gaming centre with six casinos and a themed hotel.
His beginnings were humble. “We were a poor family in the sense that we had no money but I was rich in love. My mother and father were very ordinary but lovely people.” It is his profound regret that they did not live to see the rewards his talent was to bring. “I was always self-motivated about work,” he said. “At 12, I used to take a greengrocer’s horse and cart round the area – I can still remember the route and the customers. That was my introduction to horses, really.”
He did a bricklaying apprenticeship and started his own building business. With immaculate timing, Hemmings sold up in the early 1970s for £1.5m just before the collapse of the property market. He never looked back, moving into business after business, and always showing a canny eye for a profit. Blackpool Tower cost him £74m in 1998, while two years later he bought Littlewoods’ pools operation from the Moores family for £161m. Less high-profile has been his snapping up of stakes in quoted companies through his two main vehicles, Guild Ventures and Rumney Manor. Between them, the two have stakes in 10 companies, worth in total more than £232m.
His personal company, the TJH Group, saw its profits soar to £16.1m on £97.2m sales in 2002/03, when it showed £98.3m net assets. Hemmings is easily worth £700m now, but this feet-on-the-ground adopted son of Lancashire could soon be worth over £1bn if his Blackpool dream takes shape.
Albert Gubay
Anglo International Holdings
Albert Gubay apparently rebuffed a takeover approach for his chain of Total Fitness clubs last September from an Irish supermarket tycoon. The price was not disclosed but it shows that Isle of Man-based Gubay must be on the right track with his plans for the chain. There are 20 clubs open with two more on track, concentrated in the north of England and Ireland. More recently, the Sunday Times reported it was up for sale with a £100m price tag, but nothing has yet emerged.
Gubay, who was born in North Wales, made his first fortune through the Kwik Save discount supermarket chain, which he sold in 1973 for £14m. The main element to Gubay’s fortune, though, is his £450m property portfolio. He is busy in development too: with plans to convert a former seminary in Lancashire into flats. We value the Total Fitness chain on the £100m sale price being mooted, while at 76, Gubay has cash and other assets of £100m.
Eddie Healey
Stadium Developments
Property prices may have reached a peak, if you believe the governor of the Bank of England. So canny property men like 66-year-old Eddie Healey have been looking at some sales. In June EG reported that his family company, Stadium Developments, was looking to sell off its largest UK asset, the £250m Parkgate Retail Park in Rotherham. In 2002, his Stadium Group sold its Fforestfach retail park in Swansea for £57.7m to Hammerson, while in May last year, Healey sold his remaining land round the Meadowhall centre for £13.75m.
Healey is regarded with awe by fellow developers, but he shuns the limelight. He is not above a bit of self-indulgence though; he has a new mansion on Barbados. With fellow developer Paul Sykes (20) he turned a derelict site outside Sheffield on the M1 into the top out-of-town shopping centre in Britain. The £1.2bn sale of the Meadowhall shopping centre in 1999 netted Healey around £420m for his 60% stake after debt.
Having re-invested some of the Meadowhall proceeds, we can see £257m of net assets in half a dozen separate Healey family companies, including Stadium Holdings and Stadium (Parkgate). In all, allowing for double counting on our part, Healey should be worth £600m.
David Khalili
Favermead
David Khalili, 58, is searching London for a site for his Islamic art collection. A permanent exhibition of the art will rival Charles Saatchi’s South Bank Gallery. His 20,000-piece collection has been valued at around £800m. But while the low-key Khalili has been having some success on the art front, he did not make much money by creating the world’s most expensive home in Kensington Gardens. He sold the house in 2001 to Bernie Ecclestone but is said to have spent well over the £50m he made from the sale on refurbishing it. Ecclestone sold it on this year for £70m, to industrialist Lakshmi Mittal.
Khalili, who was born in Iran, came to London in 1980 after a spell trading property in New York. The visible asset wealth in his companies is not very much at all. Two companies, Favermead Assets and Favermead Investments, have around £10.5m of net assets in their 2002/03 accounts. But he must have amassed a hefty fortune through his property dealing to assemble the art. Taking a cautious line on the art, we value that at around £500m; adding another £100m for his house proceeds, the company assets and other wealth takes him to £600m.
Paul Raymond
Paul Raymond Organisation
G-strings and stripping will no longer be available at Raymond’s Revue Bar, the first clip joint to be licensed for full nudity. The bar was opened by Paul Raymond, a former dishwasher, in 1958, yet it was Raymond himself who caused it to be closed in February. Six years ago he sold the bar to a business associate, but remained landlord of the site. Seeing its potential as real estate, he demanded an annual rent increase from £150,000 to £275,000. The December quarterly rent could not be paid and administrators were called in.
It shows how far Raymond, now 78, has moved into property. Though he keeps a low profile these days, he is still very hands-on at the Paul Raymond Organisation, with its top-shelf publications and property interests covering swathes of Soho, Chelsea and Notting Hill.
In 2002, the company made £26m profit on £40.7m sales. With its solid net assets of £188m, we value it at perhaps £550m, as many of the properties have not been revalued for up to 20 years. But we add £50m for Raymond’s personal property, past dividends and salaries (£33m alone from 1997 to 2002).
Jack Dellal
Allied Commercial Holdings
Jack Dellal’s astonishing virility is only matched by his prowess as a canny dealmaker. After becoming a father again last year for the ninth time, 81-year-old Dellal is still active in the property world. His family has invested in cinemas through the Odeon chain, and while hot weather and a dearth of good movies made much of last year tough for the industry, blockbusters such as Lord of The Rings helped at the end of the year.
Dellal made his mark in the early 1970s, selling his Dalton Barton bank for £58m and became a major property player. His most famous coup was to make £75m in a six-month period in 1987, by buying and quickly selling on Bush House in central London. Earlier this year he was engaged in talks with retail entrepreneur Philip Green about the property portfolio at Marks & Spencer, when Green was making his bid for the company.
Yet in 2002/03, profits at his Allied Commercial Holdings operation fell from £3.4m to £1.7m. It may just be because of a quiet time on the deals front, but we clip back Dellal to perhaps £590m as a result. Still enough for all those nappies.
Chris Lazari
Lazari Investments
Profits at Lazari Investments hit £16.5m in 2003/04, while the total value of its portfolio has risen to £520m, according to a recent valuation by Chesterton. It follows a hectic spending spree by Chris Lazari on buying West End properties, including Henrietta House, W1.
A Greek Cypriot by birth, he came to Britain in the early 1970s, to work in the fashion business. In 1978, he diversified into property and has never looked back. We add another £31m to his portfolio for personal property and cash in the bank, taking Lazari, at 58, to £551m.
David Sullivan
Roldvale
Soft porn, property and sport are the name of the game for David Sullivan, who owns the biggest chain of licensed sex shops in Britain, the 90-strong Private Shops empire.
The Welsh-born, 55-year-old publisher also has a property portfolio that has grown sharply in value to easily £220m, so he is feeling pretty bullish on the business front.
Now chairman of Birmingham City FC, sports fanatic Sullivan took his first steps into the top-shelf market at 21 while working at petrol stations owned by property magnate Gerald Ronson (47).
His day job selling petrol made him £30 a week, while at night he made £700-£800 a week producing porn pictures and flogging sheets of 50 photos for £1. The petrol pumps had to go. By the mid-1970s, he had 50% of the adult magazine market. He joined forces with his main competitors the Gold brothers to launch Sunday Sport in 1986, and Daily Sport.
Sport Newspapers made an operating profit of £10m on £36.4m sales in the year to August 2003. The group is valued at £200m, putting a £100m price tag on Sullivan’s stake. His Roldvale operation, with interests from property to chat lines, increased profits smartly to £13m in the year to September 2002. Adding most of the directors’ pay to the bottom line takes Roldvale’s profits to £18m, and it is easily worth £180m. Other assets including Birch Hall, his £7m Essex mansion, and £22m in salary over the past five years, take Sullivan to £550m.
Benzion Freshwater
Daejan Holdings
The growth in London property values has been a boon for Benzion Freshwater, 56, and his low-profile family. His father Osias arrived in London three days before the outbreak of the second world war as a penniless refugee. When he died in 1976, he was London’s biggest private landlord, with 20,000 tenants.
Freshwater has 267 directorships we can see in a complex web of companies. Aside from a £232m stake in quoted property group Daejan Holdings, we can see three other main companies – Highdorn, Metropolitan Properties and Centremanor – in which we attribute another £280m of net assets to the Freshwater family.
We have tried to remove double counting on our part and any charitable stakes. We have ignored a host of minor companies to allow a safety margin if we have not been ruthless enough in culling for our double counting. To these £512m of net assets we add just £10m for personal property; again, this is a conservative figure to give us more margin for error.
The Clarke family
C Le Masurier
Professional managers are helping the Clarke family to tidy up their huge Jersey property portfolio. The family, now the largest private landowners on the island, own large tracts of St Helier, retail outlets and pub sites across the island.
The death in 2001 of patriarch Fred Clarke led to the reorganisation of assets and a focus on raising asset values. As a result the C Le Masurier wine and spirit business has been sold, and further disposals are likely, while there are potential prime development areas in St Helier.
We value the Clarke assets at £500m, but our spies in Jersey say this could ultimately be a billionaire family and the professionals involved in valuing the assets are astonished at the depth and breadth of what the late Fred Clarke had cannily assembled.Frenetic workload builds strong foundations
Tom Hunter
West Coast Capital
Britain’s most generous multi-millionaire, in terms of how much of his wealth goes to charitable causes: that is the label that should be applied to Hunter. His new Hunter Foundation has been funded to the tune of £100m by Hunter with a view to spreading the entrepreneurial message round Scotland, particularly in schools.
Hunter, 43, started his business career selling trainers from concession outlets in stores, using an ancient van and his father’s garage as a distribution centre. He built up the Scotland-based Sports Division retailer which he sold in 1998 for £290m. He has invested heavily in property and, separately, in ventures with retail king Philip Green. His frenetic work rate means that since 2000 he has been involved in eight deals, either investing in businesses or buying stakes in quoted companies. Most recently, in July he bought a share in Bank of Scotland’s £130m HQ at 33 Old Broad Street in the City.
He may be outbid for a company but frequently makes a profit on the deal. Last year, for example, he sold his stake in Selfridges, making an £8m profit, after being outbid for the whole business by Galen Weston, who, he says, “had a bigger cheque book”. Still, with dividend cheques from his £20m stake in Green’s Bhs, his own cheque book is pretty big. With property doing so well – and he has ploughed £400m into his West Coast Capital property portfolio, though some is debt – Hunter is probably worth £500m, even after his huge charitable donation.
Paul Sykes
Highstone Group
The £1m he spent bankrolling the UK Independence Party in the recent Euro elections is money well spent in Paul Sykes’ view. He is determined to fight Euro integration and has thus far bankrolled UKIP to the tune of £5m.
The son of a Barnsley miner, Sykes was written off at school but proved his teachers wrong when he made his first fortune in his early 20s, breaking up old buses and selling the parts to the Far East. He moved into property, becoming a leading developer in the North. Teaming up with Eddie Healey (13) to build Meadowhall shopping centre outside Sheffield proved a shrewd move. When it was sold in 1999, Sykes cleared around £280m for his stake.
After election campaigning, Sykes has returned to what he likes best: smart new developments that regenerate his beloved Yorkshire. He is looking to build on the success of one of his key developments, in Leeds’ Victoria Quarter, where he hopes to convert the upper floors into luxury flats for rent. His new property operation, Highstone Group, showed £88.5m net assets in its 2002/03 accounts, with £6.5m profit. With proceeds from internet investments thrown in, at 61 Sykes should be worth well north of £500m. But charitable work and the hefty cost of campaigning for the pound take him to just that.
Simon Halabi
Buckingham Securities
Simon Halabi, 52, is a fan of towers. He bid (unsuccessfully) to buy the former London Stock Exchange tower, has already bought the Aviva Tower in the City for £260m plus the BSI Tower in Chiswick last year, and plans to build the London Bridge Tower with Irvine Sellar (82) and Sten Mortstedt (56).
But towers are not all that Halabi has in his expanding property portfolio, which is held in overseas family trusts, advised by the family property group Buckingham Securities. The very low-profile Syrian-born property investor, who is a British citizen and has lived here since he was a teenager, has some other choice assets. In 2000 he bought the In and Out Club in Piccadilly for £50m. The Naval & Military Club has vacated the premises and the stylish entrance makes it the perfect place for a party venue. It’s where Hugh Grant revealed his latest squeeze at the party for Love Actually. But the parties will soon be over, as Halabi has recently been granted planning permission for a luxury hotel.
In his latest deal, Halabi has agreed to sell on two shopping centres in Slough, to British Land, for £50m more than he paid for them two years ago. In all, the business assets and considerable cash resources of his family trusts are conservatively worth £500m.
Bernard Lewis
Lewis Trust
Model Elizabeth Jagger, daughter of Stones front man Sir Mick, is helping the Lewis family to a bigger fortune. She models for the River Island fashion chain, which has proved to be a strong driver of profits at the Lewis Trust Group. In 2002, the west London-based operation saw profits soar from £14.8m to £54.8m on £477m sales.
Bernard Lewis, 78, chairman since 1997, and his brother David started selling fruit from a lorry after the second world war. They moved into fashion and in 1957 started the Lewis Trust Group, which also has property and hotels. On the 2002 figures we value the business at £425m. Dividends of £50m in recent years (including a £30m payout in 2002) and half of another company, UK & European Investments, with £51m net assets, take the Lewis family to perhaps £470m after tax. As newly-released 2003 accounts show a huge increase in assets and profits, Lewis is certain to shoot up the list next year.
David Murray
Murray International & Premier Property
The Scottish Premiership title may not have gone to Ibrox, but in the boardroom at least, Rangers are doing pretty well. The recent half-year results show a sharp turnaround from a £10m loss to a £2.5m profit. This is good news for 52-year-old Murray, the long-suffering “Gers” owner, who still has to contend with a £68m debt mountain at the club.
Elsewhere the Murray empire seems to be in fine fettle. Murray International Holdings, his metals-to-property group, should show a big jump in profits in 2003/04 to nearly £20m on £295m sales. He is also planning a £250m expansion of his Premier Property Group – a move that will catapult the business into the big league. As a start, he spent £37m buying Edinburgh’s Princes Mall shopping centre, next to Waverley station, in May, and he’s just done the biggest letting in Edinburgh for nearly two years, at One Morrison Street.
Murray also recently received the green light to develop luxury homes around a £5m golf course that he completed three years ago but has yet to open because of a long-running planning dispute, now resolved in his favour.
The son of an Ayrshire coal merchant, he had just set up Murray International in 1976 when he suffered the car crash that cost him both his legs. “You could say that the accident concentrated my mind on business,” he later recalled. And what concentration it has been. Murray International is easily worth £100m, while his property portfolio – including large tracts on the outskirts of Edinburgh – is worth another £300m. We add £50m for Rangers and other assets, taking Murray to £450m.
Sir Donald Gosling
Consolidated Property Investments
With 400ft yachts being launched by the world’s billionaires, Sir Donald Gosling’s elegant Leander is beginning to look a little, shall we say it, small at 245ft. Still, for £280,000 a week, it is Britain’s most expensive charter yacht, seating 100 guests for dinner.
Among those who sampled the delights of Leander were the late Gianni Agnelli, the Italian industrial magnate. The question is, will 75-year-old Gosling want to trade upmarket and move into the same league as Microsoftie Paul Allen, who has the 413ft Octopus?
Gosling, who served in the navy as a young lad, is passionate about all things nautical. And he can afford his indulgence, having started the National Parking Corporation in 1948 with partner Ronald Hobson (31) and selling it 50 years later, netting £290m.
Gosling now has some large property investments and we can see £57m of net assets in two companies, Metrose and Consolidated Property Investments. With hefty dividends from National Parking up to its sale totalling nearly £100m, we reckon Gosling is easily worth £448m.
Eddie & Sol Zakay
Topland Group
It’s been a busy year for the Zakay brothers Eddie, 54, and Sol, 52, as they have been refinancing their property assets over the past 12 months to the tune of £1bn. Topland Group now has “significant amounts of cash” ready for any acquisitions that might be available — and that after snatching the biggest sale and leaseback of the year, when they paid £675m for 33 Tesco stores, plus distribution space, last April.
Topland itself showed £2.7m profit on £33m sales in the year to May 2003. It has net assets of £53m, and with the cash in the bank as their war chest, we value the brothers at £410m with other assets.
|
|
||
|
No |
Name |
Age |
|
220 |
Nicholas Porter |
34 |
|
206 |
Dominic Wainford |
36 |
|
278 |
William Record |
37 |
|
56 |
Sir Euan Anstruther- Gough-Calthorpe |
38 |
|
29 |
Andreas Panayiotou |
38 |
Peter Jones
Emerson Developments
Boavista Gold Club on Portugal’s Algarve was the usual setting for last year’s Sir Henry Cooper Golf Classic. The former British heavyweight champion co-hosted the event with former East Enders star Mike Reid. It was a rousing success that will have pleased Peter Jones, 69, the developer of the club.
A former joiner, Jones started as a housebuilder in Cheshire in 1959. He was one of the first developers to spot the potential of south Manchester, buying up tracts of land cheaply. He has since spread his development work overseas to Portugal and Florida.
His main company Emerson Group increased profits to £18.6m in 2002/03, when its net assets increased sharply to £369.7m. PE Jones (Properties), his other company, has around £21.5m of net assets. Jones and family trusts own all the shares in both. Jones only takes modest salaries and no dividends. We value the business assets at £391m, adding £10m of personal wealth.
Andreas Panayiotou
Ability Developments
Looking to work on larger development projects, Andreas Panayiotou, 38, put the bulk of his residential portfolio in the East End on the market in May with a £200m price tag. The holding through his Ability Developments is spread over 20 schemes in the Hackney and Islington areas.
Soon after the announcement of the planned sale was made, he bought a site with planning permission for a 17-storey apartment block on the Isle of Dogs. Ability paid Fairview New Homes between £25m and £30m for the 1.4-acre former Jaguar showroom at 3 Limeharbour, E14.
More larger schemes are also planned with the funds released from the sale, such as Ability Towers – 10 four-storey apartment blocks in E1, comprising 115,000 sq ft – and Ability Plaza, a 120,000 sq ft apartment building in E8.
A champion amateur boxer in his teens, Panayiotou won ABA county titles and was considering a professional career. But it was his mother who persuaded him to turn his talent from the ring to business, and in 1996 he took over running of Ability Developments from his father.
His Ability Developments showed £69m of net assets in its last 2002/03 accounts, but with its rapid growth, the £200m valuation on the bulk of his assets, and his other businesses such as Ability Shipping, which is building a £25m yacht for chartering, Panayiotou is now worth around £400m. Some in the industry raise their eyebrows at our valuation, saying we are too generous, but for the moment we are sticking with it. Next year may be different.
Robert & Vincent Tchenguiz
Rotch Property Group
Barely a week goes by without brothers Robert, 47, and Vincent, 44, buying or selling, anything from pubs to cinemas to motorway service stations. The Iranian-born brothers escaped the revolution as they were in America at the time but their family fled to London, where the brothers joined them. They started dealing in flats in Hammersmith and never looked back. Today their total property portfolio is reckoned to be worth well over £2.5bn.
They borrow to the hilt to take over buildings or other assets and bank on making more money from rental income than the cost of servicing their debt. It can work spectacularly well when they later sell. They recently made a £58m profit on the disposal of the Pubmaster chain of pubs, where they had a 34% stake.
Despite such profits, little wealth is visible in Rotch Property Group, their main company. Assets fell in 2002/03 to £441m though the company’s losses fell from £21m to £15m on £45m sales.
Stripping out the borrowings from that £2.5bn of assets should leave the brothers with perhaps £400m of net wealth. This includes Robert’s £20m mansion next to the Royal Albert Hall and the Pubmaster profit. We are constantly taken to task over our valuation for the brothers, but until either side comes up with hard figures we are going to put our neck out again and leave them at £400m jointly.
Ronald Hobson
Consolidated Property Investments
Property investment is proving highly lucrative for Hobson, 83, the low-profile co-founder of the National Car Parks operation. With his partner Sir Donald Gosling (26), Hobson has some pretty sizeable property operations. Metrose Properties and Consolidated Property Investments, their two main companies, saw their net assets surge by £9m between them to £57m in 2002/03.
But then the two have always been canny investors. Hobson teamed up with Gosling after the war to build car parks on old bomb sites in London and around Britain. For the first site, in Holborn, they put up just £100 each. They sold the parent company, National Parking Corporation, in 1998 for £801m to UK company Cendant, collecting around £290m each.
Huge dividends prior to that and shrewd property investment take Hobson to £398m, a £4m rise on last year, reflecting his share of the rise in the assets of the two property companies.
Robert Edmiston
IM Properties
As ever, at 58 Bob Edmiston is busy combining his passion for work with his charitable activities. Wearing his charitable hat, he is giving £2m to help a new school in Solihull that will help disadvantaged kids, while on the business front his IM Group could reap a healthy profit from its 75% stake in the Funding Corporation, which provides lending services to organisations such as Diners Club and Capital One.
A float has been mooted but Edmiston is in no hurry – or need of the cash. He prays to God and listens to his accountant. It works a treat as this committed Christian’s businesses motor along very nicely.
Edmiston is one of Britain’s biggest importers of Far Eastern cars, as well as a leading property man. His Birmingham-based IM Group made £8.1m profit on £322m sales in 2003 and has £198m net assets. His separate IM Properties made £24.4m profit on £27.2m sales in 2003. It has a strong asset base too with £148.2m net assets. In all, the two companies are worth their £346m net assets.
His faith, he reckons, has helped him, and he has put £63m into his Christian Vision charity, which uses radio stations to spread the word among a 700m-strong audience. He makes huge donations – he gave £27m to charity in 2003 from both companies – but has had hefty salaries over the years (£1m pay and £12m to his pension fund in 2003). So we add another £34m for past salaries and his pension fund, taking Edmiston to £380m.
David Wilson
Wilson Bowden
It might be best known as a quality housebuilder, but Wilson Bowden also has a solid reputation for its property development and regeneration schemes. The Leicestershire-based operation is involved in the attempt to create a new town on the site of the old Ravenscraig steel works south of Glasgow. In Glasgow city centre it has teamed up with Selfridges to develop a site for a store, associated retail and housing. In the north of England it is assembling a 420-acre site at Kingsway in Rochdale. All this shows that the group is doing well, despite fears that the housing market is heading for a downturn.
It comes also some 44 years since David Wilson, now 62, started the business. He recently relinquished the job of chief executive, though retaining chairmanship of the business to which he has devoted his working life. And what a life it has been. From humble beginnings in Ibstock, north Leicestershire, 18-year-old Wilson joined his father in a building venture in 1960. It prospered and Wilson floated Wilson Bowden on the stock market in 1987.
Today it is regarded as the best quoted housebuilder by City analysts, and confirmed its reputation by producing record profits of £223m on £1.2bn turnover in 2003. Wilson’s stake is now worth £324m. With nearly £50m of share sales since the flotation and over £18m in salary and dividends in the past two years, we value Wilson at £380m after tax.
|
|
|
|
Born in 1960s |
36 |
|
Born in 1950s |
85 |
|
Born in 1940s |
108 |
|
Born in 1930s |
77 |
|
Born in 1920s |
24 |
|
Born in 1910s |
3 |
Charlotte Townshend
Addison Developments
Recently nominated to be a high sheriff of Dorset, Charlotte Townshend, 49, will no doubt be monitoring what is happening to the disused half-acre of land on her 40-acre or so Ilchester Estate in Holland Park, London. Planning permission has been secured on the £8m site for a house that could cost a further £5m to build.
At 15 Townshend inherited her London acreage from her father, the ninth Viscount Galway, and in 1990 a further £40m in her mother’s will, including 15,000 Dorset acres and 3,000 in Nottinghamshire. The latter have been sold for a reputed £9m. Holland Park’s popularity with bankers, billionaires and tycoons should make it largely immune to any slowing in the housing market. Townshend’s four companies, including Addison Developments and Evershot Farms, show little growth in their £10m net asset total. But the firm market for exclusive London property, as shown by the £8m paid for the half acre plot, forces us to raise Townshend this year to £370m.
Keith Miller
Miller Group
A Scots invasion of the London and South East housing market is planned by Keith Miller, 55, chief executive of the Miller Group, Britain’s biggest privately-owned housebuilder and property operation which owns Miller Developments.
The Edinburgh-based business certainly has the firepower to take over a business in the South. Its profits rose 47% to £40.2m on £743m of sales in 2003 and it has had a strong first half in 2004. Miller joined the business in 1975 and became a director a year later. In 1994, he became chief executive of the family-dominated firm.
It is worth around £375m, valuing the family’s 93% stake at £348m. Past dividends (£22.5m from 1994 to 2002) take the Miller family to £368m easily.
Freddie Linnett
Charles Street Buildings (Leicester)
Profits at Charles Street Buildings (Leicester) rose to a record £32.4m in 2002, while the net assets at the family-owned property group also rose to a healthy £275.8m.
Freddie Linnett, a former farm worker in her native Ireland, began at the firm making tea. She is now a director and leading shareholder in the business started by her uncles after the war, having inherited their stakes.
We value the business at £276m even today. Other assets and £50m of dividends from 1995 to 2002 inclusive, take Linnett, 54, and family to £330m.
Harry Hyams
Walton Investment Co
Still involved in the property world, Hyams, 76, has had a coup with his Walton Investments, which turned in a £5.4m profit in 2002/03.
But there is little that Hyams, the son of an East End bookmaker, does not know about property. Hyams is one of a select band of individuals to retain a current account at the Bank of England – a facility long since stopped for mere mortals. He will of course always be best known for the 1970s Centre Point Tower in central London.
His coup was to buy a stake in the Oldham Estates group in 1959 for £50,000. When it was taken over in 1988 by giant MEPC, he received £150m. Hyams made a further £98m when MEPC was taken over in 2000.
His Wiltshire estate at Ramsbury is beautifully maintained, although he now spends a good deal of his time in the South of France. The £7m of net assets in small Hyams companies, including Walton, and his art collection should easily keep the low-profile Hyams at £315m.
John Madejski
Sackville Properties
Property deals are becoming an important part of John Madejski’s portfolio. The 63-year-old owner of Reading Football Club has a 70% stake in Sackville Properties, which has just sold a £200m portfolio to Hilstone Corporation and intends to recycle the money in property. Sackville itself produced a healthy £756,000 profit on £7.1m sales in 2002/03.
That he can afford such an investment is testament to Madejski’s talent for wealth creation. A former advertising executive on his local paper in Reading, he launched a magazine in 1977, selling cars by classified ads with a picture. It worked a treat and in 1998, he netted £174m from the sale of AutoTrader‘s parent Hurst Publishing. By then Madejski was chairman of the local football club, and the legacy of his sale is the magnificent Madejski Stadium, home to First Division Reading.
The property and hotel developments associated with the stadium are also helping to boost Madejski’s fortune. His other investments include publishing interests round the world, a bottling plant in China, and the Goodhead Group, which prints every telephone directory in Britain. He is also a leading business angel, investing in new ventures that could net millions. Over in the Galapagos Islands, Madejski owns the Royal Palm Hotel, voted one of the best hotels in the world by Tatler no less. In all, he is easily worth £305m now, despite the heavy drain on his finances of running a football club chasing promotion.
Don & Roy Richardson
Swiftfire
The 74-year-old Richardson twins’ eponymous development company is still involved in scores of flagship projects in the Midlands. Their prime 1 Colmore Square office building in Birmingham has just been sold for £90m. Their main company, Swiftfire, saw its profit fall to just £4.2m profit on £37.7m sales in 2002. But it has £116m of net assets (down £2m on the year) and we value the business on that figure.
The Richardsons are putting the European designer outlet centres they bought in 2002 into a new £490m fund run by Henderson Global Investors. Yet after allowing for some borrowing on the acquisition of the European assets, and taking account of other deals and £44m of salaries in recent years, we reckon the Richardsons have around £298m of assets.
Mark Dixon
Regus
Like Lazarus rising from the dead, serviced office company Regus refused to die. To prove the point, in July it swallowed up US rival HQ Global in a £164m deal.
For Mark Dixon, the former sandwich and burger salesman who started the Chertsey-based company in 1989 using the £800,000 proceeds from selling a bakery operation, the past two years must have been like going to hell and back. In 2000, he floated Regus on the stock market valued at £1.5bn. He was briefly a billionaire – on paper at least.
But profit warnings and economic slowdown, as the dot.com boom turned to bust, hit Regus hard. Its American operation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and the shares collapsed. But Dixon cut his cost base and negotiated his way out of Chapter 11 last November. Last month he said the company is on track to deliver its first full-year profit. The shares have responded and his stake has risen sharply over the past year, to £247m. Other assets and the proceeds of a £61m share sale in 1998 take 45-year-old Dixon to £290m easily.
Jonathan Hunt
Foxtons
Rapid expansion is the strategy for Foxtons, the upmarket London estate agency. In 2002, it opened four new branches and invested heavily in a new computer system, which pegged back its profits to £700,000, though sales grew sharply to £61.7m at its Heven Holdings parent company. It was back on track and in profit in 2003, and is reckoned to easily be worth £100m.
The Foxtons business is owned by Hunt, 51, who founded the company in 1982 in Notting Hill, having been in property since he was 17. The high-profile operation is best known, perhaps, for the fleet of strangely attired green and yellow Minis driven by its staff round upmarket streets in London. Aside from expansion in London, Hunt has also developed an estate agency operation in America, which is now reckoned to be worth £100m as well.
Other business assets such as a serviced office operation and financial group Alexander Hall take his business assets to £235m. His Suffolk estate, London home and art easily take Hunt to £280m, making him Britain’s richest estate agent by a mile.
Tony Gallagher
AC Gallagher
Midlands-based developer AC Gallagher is quietly getting on with a number of big projects throughout Britain. It has just had 1,000 housing units approved in Cambridge and another 10,000 are in the development process in the West Midlands. An imaginative scheme to convert a former power station site near Poole in Dorset will produce 1.3m sq ft of new residential development, typical of the company’s work on brownfield sites.
The company, owned and run by 52-year-old Tony Gallagher, made £10.9m profit in the 18 months to June 2003. With a strong asset base and a strong landbank for future developments, it is easily worth £170m. But Gallagher is also the largest private owner of retail parks throughout the UK, taking him to around £275m.
Jack Petchey
Trefick & Petchey Properties
Patiently building stakes in quoted companies where the share price is way below the underlying value of the assets is Petchey’s way of doing business. The canny East Ender has made his fortune as a result. With no formal education, Petchey first earned money running errands, and worked as a taxi driver after the war. Using his £39 army gratuity, he built a fleet of taxis. He later expanded into used cars, property and timeshare. He once bought Watford Football Club from Sir Elton John, but has since sold his stake.
Petchey, 79, lives in London’s Docklands and commutes to his office in Ilford daily. He plans to give the bulk of his sizeable fortune to charity through the Jack Petchey Foundation. He was the sole shareholder in two Isle of Man companies that were sold to the quoted Saville Gordon property group in 1998, for which he received £72m in cash and £15m in shares.
Today we can see £182m of share stakes held by Petchey in 10 quoted companies. He recently made a £5.4m profit when Leo Noe (44) bought the quoted Estates & General group where Petchey had a 29% stake. With earlier proceeds and past profits, he is easily worth £272m.
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|
||
|
No |
Name |
Age |
|
44 |
Jack Lyons |
88 |
|
89 |
Maurice Wohl |
87 |
|
52 |
Jack Baylis |
84 |
|
31 |
Ronald Hobson |
83 |
|
179 |
Philip Davies |
83 |
Jack & Jonathan Lyons
JE London Properties
Originally from Leeds, Isidore (Jack) Lyons sold his first retail business back in the early 1950s for about £3m; with his brother Bernard he then built up stores group UDS, which they sold to Hanson in the early 1980s, netting several million for the family stake.
Together with his son Jonathan, 88-year-old Jack owns very large property holdings in the Notting Hill/Kensington area, held in part through JE London Properties. Many of these freeholds were purchased many years ago for next to nothing and are now worth £2m apiece. The family also has extensive property assets in the US.
Jonathan runs the family companies, which include the venture capitalist Albion Group and the Sir Jack Lyons Charitable Trust.
Jack Lyons used to be Sir Jack but like his friend Gerald Ronson (47) he got embroiled in the Guinness scandal of the 1980s. Although stripped of his knighthood, and after £25m spent on legal bills, he is determined to clear his name.
The family also has extensive art and Jack Lyons recently sold a Monet Waterlilies, one of the finest, at a Christie’s auction in Manhattan for nearly £15m. He still has many other superb paintings, including works by Canneletto and Degas.
Jack is the principal benefactor to the London Symphony Orchestra, and also a major donor to York University and the Royal Opera House. He recently gave £2m to York to build a new art block, and also donated a Sir Jacob Epstein bust of Vaughan Williams.
Jack divides his time between a huge home in Miami and two houses in Switzerland. Jonathan, 53, with homes in London and Switzerland, is a very close friend of King Abdullah of Jordan.
Though there is not much sign of asset wealth in JE London Properties (£553,000 net assets) or any of the half-dozen directorships held by Jonathan, he recently expressed surprise at not being in the Sunday Times Rich List. We are happy to oblige and a £250m valuation is certainly conservative.
Marquess of Salisbury
Gascoyne Cecil Estates
The seventh Marquess of Salisbury has carried on the family tradition of involvement in Tory politics, first as an MP and later as leader of the Lords. But he has had time to raise his beloved pigs (shades of PG Wodehouse perhaps) since being sacked by the then Tory leader William Hague, for colluding with Tony Blair over the future of hereditary peers.
He is of course a prime example of the species. The family can trace its involvement in the affairs of state back to Lord Burghley, a key minister to Elizabeth I. Salisbury’s great-great-grandfather was prime minister on three separate occasions. In his last Cabinet, in 1900, he was sufficiently powerful to include a son-in-law and two nephews. In those days the country was to all intents and purposes governed from Hatfield House. It is of course ownership of Hatfield that puts Salisbury into this list.
Completed in 1612, Hatfield is a treasure trove of hugely valuable paintings. It also has a 3,000-acre park and woodland and a further vast acreage of farmland. In addition, there is Cranborn Manor, the family estate in Dorset from where Salisbury sells his organic sausages. Shrewdly, he is also developing the family’s London acreage round Leicester Square.
The family’s company Gascoyne Holdings owns the Hippodrome nightclub, and is in talks to convert it into a casino. The London estate, American land, the two stately homes with their surrounding 10,300 acres and the huge art collection make Salisbury, 58, easily worth £250m.
Leo Noe
Agra & REIT Asset Management
It’s been a busy year on the property front for even the hyperactive Noe. As one of London’s leading property men, the low-profile Noe was in the news in July when he took over the quoted Estates & General property operation for £71m. He had also made a £440m takeover bid for the quoted Derwent Valley. In January Noe withdrew that offer, citing management’s refusal to meet with him. But he has plenty else on his plate. In February his REIT Asset Management vehicle bought the St Katharine Docks development at Tower Bridge for £283.3m.
Noe is also keen on trading in shopping centres, buying three in early 2002 for £246m and selling them last year for £300m. Back in 1997 it was reckoned that Noe’s family trusts had over £40m to invest. Yet his family company Agra had net assets of just £26m in 2002, while we can see various other property companies with at least £10m. But this is the tip of a large iceberg and with his recent deals, Noe, 51, is easily worth £250m.
Gerald Ronson
Heron Corporation
“I’m old fashioned, I’ve got one wife, one house. This building feels like home,” says Gerald Ronson of his Heron headquarters building on the Marylebone Road, which has served him through ups and downs since 1963. And what ups and downs there have been. In the mid-1980s, Ronson was a colossus of the property world with a huge £600m-plus fortune tied up in Heron. Then he was embroiled in the 1980s Guinness scandal. Ronson served six months of a 12-month sentence in Ford Open Prison after being convicted of secret share buying agreements in connection with Guinness’s £2.8bn bid for the Distillers drinks company. At the same time, Heron nearly went bankrupt, a victim of the early 1990s property downturn.
But Ronson emerged from prison and has rebuilt the operation, with the support of some wealthy backers. Since then he has been trying to clear his name. Late in 2002, though, the Court of Appeal rejected his appeal to have his conviction quashed. But he had the satisfaction of getting the European Court of Human Rights to rule that he had been robbed of his right to silence in the 1990 trial.
Heron has also been rebuilt and has £1bn of assets, with Ronson, 65, planning a huge Heron Tower in the City. The Ronson family stake is now worth at least £200m. We add another £45m for the assets of Snax 24, the family’s garage business, past salaries and personal property.
Michael Evans
Evans Property Holdings
Michael Evans, 68, leads a low-key Leeds-based family with extensive property interests. His late father, refusing to go into the family’s tailoring operation, started Evans of Leeds as a transport firm but moved into housebuilding and property. He was still hard at work in his 90s.
The family took the company private in 1999 in a deal valuing it at £164m. A new parent company has been formed, Evans Property Holdings, which has £228.5m net assets in its 2003/04 accounts, when its profits rose 27.3% to £18.5m. The family has 90% of the shares, worth nearly £206m. We add £30m for other assets and past dividends.
Stanley & Peter Thomas
TBI
The commercial property investments of the Thomas family are doing “very well”, in the words of Stanley, the elder of the two brothers. A new 300-acre development outside Cardiff has just been given planning consent.
But the family money comes originally from the much more mundane world of pies. Stanley, now 63, and Peter, 61, built up a large snack and pie business, Peter’s Savoury Products, which they sold to GrandMet in 1988 for £75m. They then went into property and built up the quoted TBI, which later moved into airports. Late last year, there was brief speculation around TBI when a German construction group seemed about to bid, but in the end it did not move.
Stanley chairs TBI and the Thomas family has a £67m stake in the business, which has boomed on the back of budget airline growth. Another £25m in ventures such as Atlantic Property Developments takes the family to perhaps £209m after their hefty charitable donations.
Victor Hwang
Parkview International London
The son of a Hong Kong businessman who wanted to own property from childhood, Victor Hwang has one of the top sites in London to develop. In 1993, his family bought Battersea Power Station for £10m. After 10 years, work is said to be close to starting on a £750m development with a rooftop hotel, cinemas, a casino and 650 apartments. Hwang, 50, owns a quarter of the project.
We can see some assets in Parkview International, a £4m company. With his Mayfair home and other baubles, Hwang is easily worth £200m.
Grahame Whateley
Castlemore Holdings
The work ethic Grahame Whateley learnt from his grandfather – a Nottinghamshire miner – has been put to good use as, at 61, he is now one of the UK’s largest developers of out-of-town retail schemes. Based in Halesowen, Birmingham, Whateley did his first deal in 1969, and was inspired to set up Castlemore. Today it is working on 10m sq ft of new space and is building an investment portfolio.
In the year to September 2003, Castlemore made a sharply higher £17.7m profit on £146.5m sales. Adding part of Whateley’s £6.6m salary to the bottom line takes the profit to £20m. Castlemore has £106m of net assets, while Whateley’s other property trusts and private assets take him to £200m easily, maybe more.
Jack Baylis
JT Baylis
A new aircraft museum with a Concorde as a centrepiece should help draw in the crowds at The Mall at Cribbs Causeway, Bristol’s main out-of-town shopping centre. That would be good news for Jack Baylis, 84, one of the West Country’s leading developers.
He started in a small way after the war, using his army gratuity to repair bomb-damaged buildings in Bristol. Seeing the rise in land values in the 1960s, Baylis cannily bought up the land on which Cribbs Causeway is now built.
Teaming up with Prudential, in 1998 he opened The Mall, then valued at £500m. The Baylis family trusts have a 30% stake, now worth perhaps £180m.
The family company JT Baylis & Co reflects some of that with a £4m profit on £10m sales in 2002/03. Its net assets rose £16m to £95m, but we keep the Baylis family at £194m, taking in other assets.
Sir John & Peter Beckwith
Pacific Investments
Iain Duncan Smith’s brief reign as Tory leader ended after prominent party backers called for his head. Among them was Sir John Beckwith, 57, who has given £500,000 to party funds and helped raise another £2m. Whether Michael Howard is the winner he craves to beat the Blair regime, only time will tell. But with his brother Peter, 59, Sir John has a habit of backing winners.
The Old Harrovian pair made their first fortune in real estate, netting around £80m when they sold their London & Edinburgh Trust group to Swedes SPP in 1990 just before the property crash. Since then the brothers have invested in a range of ventures.
Peter has a stake in The Ambassador Theatre Group, a fast expanding operation that achieved £44m sales in 2002. It could be worth £40m, valuing his stake at £8m. In addition he has another £7m of net assets in small property companies.
Sir John’s main company, Pacific Investments 11, turned in a £2.6m loss on £20.6m sales in 2002/03, while its net assets fell to £31.7m. We cut our valuation to its net asset figure. But the brothers have also invested in sports-related businesses and sold them on at a profit of at least £50m. Adding properties, hotels in France, and Sir John’s investment in the Model Frontiers fashion agency, a £190m valuation is appropriate this year, reflecting the fall in Pacific’s valuation.
Laurence Kirschel
Consolidated Developments
Laurence Kirschel has big ambitions for Soho, starting with the development of a triangular site bounded by Old Compton Street, Moor Street and Charing Cross Road.
His Consolidated Developments won consent for a 40-bedroom boutique hotel, a 750-cover restaurant, three shops and seven apartments on the site in 2000. This year, he has also restructured the Conran Group’s lease at 100 Wardour Street to bring in Cuban bar El Floridita and has just developed the Soho Hotel.
Kirschel set up Consolidated in 1983 with just £5,000 capital. In its 2002 accounts, it showed £36.9m net assets. But these asset values do not take accounts of Kirschel’s substantial holdings in Soho, where his 1m sq ft holding is on a par with that of Paul Raymond’s (13).
With other assets, including some choice Mayfair acreage, 41-year-old Kirschel has certainly done well in the past 21 years and we move him up from 154th last year, valuing him at £185m for now, until the Soho and other developments are under way.
Richard & Ian Livingstone
London & Regional
Now working on a £500m office, hotel and housing scheme on the Greenwich peninsula, the Livingstone brothers hope to exploit anticipated demand as the redevelopment of the ill-fated Dome site gets under way. They bought 12 acres on the western side of the peninsular last year from the Trustees of Morden College.
It is typical of the low-key Livingstones, who have made their mark yet again in the past year with some big office deals in central London.
The brothers made their first big money in 1994 when, having built up a property portfolio through a company called Strategic Properties, they sold it on for £92m, making a £29m profit on the deal. They did not stop work but reinvested the proceeds in other property ventures.
Richard, 42, and Ian, 39, have at least 139 directorships, past or present, between them. But only nine separate companies, owned by overseas trusts, show any significant assets. The 2002 net assets for these, including London & Regional Commercial Property Holdings, totalled £168m in 2002. The Livingstones also own the David Clulow chain of opticians, which is worth at least £10m. With other assets and property, we value the Livingstones at £180m.
Jim Mellon
Regent Pacific Corporate Finance
A bounce back in Far Eastern shares has helped boost the fortune of 47-year-old Mellon, the Oxford-educated financier regarded as a maverick and buccaneer by more orthodox City types. In Britain, he is investing in hotels in Blackpool, reckoning that it will be transformed into a new Las Vegas. He is also the biggest property holder on the Isle of Man.
Through his Regent Pacific operation he has sizeable investments in Hong Kong and the booming South Korean economy worth well over £50m. Mellon, who always thinks one step ahead of the main investment community in the City, has also done well through his Charlemagne Capital investments in Eastern Europe, with banks in Croatia and Bulgaria. These investments are also worth over £50m. All told, his fortune this year is around £175m.
Sir Euan Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe
Calthorpe Estates
Regeneration projects, new science parks and awards for new residential housing are all testament to Sir Euan Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe’s vision to shake up the leafy Edgbaston area of Birmingham.
He wants to make the 1,550-acre estate the best place to live and work in the Midlands. The estate, which dates back to 1717, is part of Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe’s inheritance from 1985, when he took over the title from his late grandfather.
The value of the estate rose by 10% last year, with surging house prices in the Midlands, to around £110m. We can see some of that in Calthorpe Holdings, which had £9.4m net assets in 2002/03. His trusts made around £40m profit in 1999 by selling off 300 acres in Hampshire for development, leaving the family with 4,000 acres there. Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, 38, also has interests in America and property in Europe. Conservatively we value the family at £175m.
Sten Mortstedt
CLS Holdings
The new 66-storey London Bridge Tower, nicknamed the “shard of glass”, being developed by Irvine Sellar (82), will also be a monument to a quiet Swedish property man.
Mortstedt, 64, is chairman of CLS, the quoted property developer based in London, which is backing Sellar in the project and has taken a 33% stake. If all goes to plan, it should generate huge profits.
But right now the Mortstedt family has just over half of CLS, and that stake is worth around £144m. Share sales of over £30m and other assets take the Mortstedts to £175m, possibly a lot more but we are being cautious.
Alan Murphy
Nikal Investments
Property development is now taking up much of Alan Murphy’s time. He has formed a new company, Nikal Investments, which is developing sites throughout the north of England and Birmingham with an end value of at least £350m. One of the biggest is the £300m Masshouse development with David McLean Developments (174), in Birmingham. In less than a year, the uplift in values has meant that Nikal has added £10m to Murphy’s wealth.
A former Liverpool supermarket owner, Murphy sold up and went into making toilet rolls in 1982 through newly formed AM Paper. Fifteen years later, after AM had grown sharply on the back of £30m investment in new equipment, Murphy sold part of his stake for £100m, and the rest two years later for £50m. With the property deals and other investments and personal assets, we reckon at 56, he should easily be worth £170m.
Brian Scowcroft
Alard Properties
It is five years since Brian Scowcroft started his development company, Alard Properties. He has a passion to revitalise his adopted county, Cumbria, and Alard is certainly doing that. It now has four business parks in Wales and the North, including Kingmoor near Carlisle.
He has ploughed around £7m of his own money into the 400-acre Kingmoor industrial park on the outskirts of Carlisle and, with it, helped create more than 1,300 jobs. It is the flagship in his business park portfolio, which includes sites in Stockport, Leigh and Wrexham.
Alard, which employs eight people and turns over around £4.5m pa, is a world away from Scowcroft’s previous life as boss of Swinton Insurance. Brian’s father Ken Scowcroft founded Swinton in his front room in 1957, and built it to be one of the largest car insurance companies in Britain. In 1988, he started selling stakes in the firm to Sun Alliance. By the early 1990s the Scowcroft family had made around £150m from the sale before tax. Brian, a qualified chartered accountant, went into industrial sites as he had the capital to acquire the land cheaply.
Only about half the 570 acres on his four sites are developed and there is scope to double the £4.5m annual rental income over the next five years. Scowcroft, 48, also loves the peace of his 1,500-acre estate in the Lake District, where he spends his time shooting and collecting cars. In all, with the success of Alard (£15.6m net assets in 2002), the earlier Swinton proceeds and personal assets, the Scowcroft family is worth £163m.
Elliott Bernerd
Chelsfield
Persistence must be Elliott Bernerd’s motto. After three attempts to take the quoted Chelsfield property group private, he succeeded in January with an £895m offer, backed by a number of investors including David and Simon Reuben (2). The deal valued Bernerd’s stake at nearly £109m. But Bernerd and the Reubens have already had approaches to buy them out and are reported to disagree about the future of the company.
Bernerd started work as an office boy in an estate agency at 16. He moved rapidly in the property world, and founded Chelsfield in 1987, floating it on the stock market in 1993. Its assets include the Wentworth golf course in Surrey now up for sale, and the huge Merry Hill shopping centre in the Midlands, as well as the White City shopping mall development in west London, where Chelsfield finally signed up funding with German fund CGI in August.
Aside from his Chelsfield stake, 59-year-old Bernerd also has the separate Chelsfield International, which is involved in large projects in Italy and Gibraltar. They could be worth over £500m, but right now we add just £50m to Bernerd’s wealth for other assets and put him at £159m.
Eliasz Englander
Citywise
Eliasz Englander, 72, and his family are leading but very low-key property players in London. Through Citywise, they own Holborn Links, and its £137.7m of net assets in 2002 pushes the Englanders up the table this year from 79th last year.
The family also has several other separate smaller companies with net assets totalling at least £20m. In all, the Englander family is easily worth £158m.
|
|
|
|
Inherited |
67 |
|
Self-made |
266 |
Mendi & Moises Gertner
Orgate
The Gertner brothers Mendi, 45, and Moises, 47, continue their frenetic pace in the London property market. They recentlysold 1 America Square to the State of Qatar for £110m, only a year after buying it from Japanese investor Shimizu for £93m. Their most spectacular coup was the 2002 purchase of the Liffe building, home to the London futures market, for £167m. They are also expanding in Europe and recently set up a fund to invest there, called Glaven.
Their main company Orgate saw its net assets increase to £65m in 2002/03. But other stakes add £10m in companies we can see. Cautiously we raise the Gertners to £150m, to take account of the profits on deals and property purchases, which we reckon will probably have been acquired with some borrowing.
Sir Jack Hayward
Wend Investments
At 81, Sir Jack Hayward has called it a day as chairman of struggling premiership team Wolves, handing over the baton to son Rick. But Wolves fans can have no complaints about Sir Jack’s years. He gave them a new stadium, restored the team to the top flight (albeit briefly), spent £60m doing so and, in a final act of generosity, wrote off nearly £40m of debt owed to him from the club.
Such was his exasperation with the financial demands of running a football club that Hayward once famously called himself the “golden tit” who kept Wolves afloat. Yet we do not reckon that the £100m he has effectively spent on the club will dent his bank balance too much.
Though he was born within sight of Molyneux, Hayward’s money came from development work abroad. In 1956 he settled in the Bahamas and used the £26m proceeds from the 1972 sale of the family business to develop Grand Bahama, taking over management of the Grand Bahama Port Authority Group.
With a partner he transformed the island into a thriving economic community, and owns the airport, seaport, tanker terminal and the electricity and water companies.
Although no accounts are available for the port authority, one local businessman told the Financial Times in the mid-1990s that the infrastructure put in place was worth £1bn. Hayward doesn’t own it all, but we reckon that, even after the Wolves spending, he should comfortably be worth £150m.
Tom Scott
Comprop
Having conquered the Channel Isles, Tom Scott is now looking at the South Coast of England for his next business venture. Dubbed Mr Jersey, he wants to expand into wholesaling or supermarkets within 100 miles of the coast. The quoted CI Traders group he runs has many of the pubs on the islands and brews much of the beer. It controls 40 supermarkets, has a string of franchises, and hotels, restaurants and a consumer finance arm. Another venture, International Energy Group, controls the islands’ energy supplies, while Scott also has a 30% stake in Comprop, the islands’ biggest property group.
Scott’s stakes in all these ventures are worth collectively £46.5m. Yet Scott is no native islander. Having built up a crane hire operation that was sold for £75m in 1987, he moved to Guernsey. But rather than playing golf and enjoying the life of a tax exile, he saw new business opportunities and never looked back.
Aside from his quoted stakes, Scott has the Jackson Group, a motor trader that sells most of the luxury marques on the island. It is also active on the South Coast, and has sales of £170m. With his private property portfolio and energy interests in Britain, France and Portugal added (not forgetting an £11.4m share sale in 2001), Scott, 59, is easily worth £150m, and rising.
The Clarke family
St Modwen Properties
The death of Sir Stan Clarke late last month robbed the property world and racing of one of its most colourful figures. One of the top developers in the Midlands, Clarke had more recently built up his racing interests. Through his Northern Racing operation he had become the biggest racecourse owner after the Jockey Club with nine courses round Britain.
After being turned down by the army at 21 because of his health, Clarke became a plumber in the Staffordshire village where he lived, later starting up a construction business with £125 of savings. He sold the company, Clarke Securities, for £51m in 1987. Shrewdly, he kept the property side of the business, now called St Modwen, which specialises in brownfield developments. It recently acquired the MG Rover site at Longbridge for £42.5m. Though he had retired from the chairmanship of St Modwen earlier this year, and of Northern Racing in July, his stakes in both were worth around £128m in total. We assume these will pass to his family with other assets of around £20m.
|
|
||
|
No |
Name |
Wealth (£m) |
|
20 |
Tom Hunter |
500 |
|
25 |
David Murray |
450 |
|
35 |
Keith Miller |
368 |
|
67 |
Robert Adair |
145 |
|
138 |
Sir John Mactaggart |
64 |
|
182 |
Louis Goodman |
40 |
|
220 |
John Ray |
30 |
|
240 |
Barrie Clapham |
25 |
|
255 |
John Kennedy |
23 |
|
265 |
Oliver Burge |
20 |
Robert Adair
Melrose Resources and Terrace Hill
Robert Adair trained as a chartered accountant with Arthur Andersen before moving into the City. He chairs Terrace Hill, the London and Glasgow-based property services group, where he has a £36.3m stake. Adair, 47, also chairs Melrose Resources, the Edinburgh-based oil services-to-exploration group, where his stake has soared to £105.8m. Other assets take him to £145m.
Christopher Moran
Chesterlodge
It could be five years before Christopher Moran, 56, moves to his new home: Crosby Hall on the Thames in Chelsea. Yet he has been at work on the 85-room Tudor-style palace for nearly 16 years. There is even an indoor pool designed on the lines of Henry VIII’s Whitehall bathing pool. Moran, who was expelled from Lloyd’s insurance market in 1982 for misconduct, has – according to his friends in high places – built up a £300m fortune and owns a 46,000-acre Glenfiddich estate in Scotland. We are more cautious. Chesterlodge, his main holding company, saw net assets rise to £71.5m in the year to April 2003. We add another £68.5m for his London home, the Scottish property and so on.
Paul Thwaites
Ashwell Property Group
Paul Thwaites, who never went to university but is now said to own half of Cambridge, is powering ahead in the East Anglian property market with a development programme totalling some £3bn at his Ashwell Property Group.
He started the business in 1981 as a quantity surveying operation but 17 years later moved into property and building in its own right. Since then Ashwell has built up a strong reputation for development and private finance initiative work, and Thwaites has built a personal fortune that enables him to bank at Coutts. Yet Thwaites, 50, lives with his wife and two young children in a cottage outside Cambridge.
In 2002/03, Ashwell Property showed £24.5m net assets in its accounts. But with its share of joint venture work and its huge workload, including a £600m Cambridge development and a £400m housebuilding programme across East Anglia, we give the business a £130m valuation. We add £5m for other assets, taking Thwaites to £135m.
Michael Horton
Hortons Estate
A busy time for Birmingham developer Hortons Estate. Its acclaimed Innovation Square in the city centre is nearly fully let to blue-chip clients. At the other end of the spectrum, it has diversified into industrial estates near Midlands motorway junctions. The business dates back to the 19th century, when butcher Isaac Horton moved into property development in central Birmingham.
The family, led by Michael Horton, 65, still owns the business, which made £7m profit on sales of £15.6m in the year to September 2003, when net assets rose to a record £121.1m. We value the family at that asset figure, adding £10m for past dividends. In six years, from 1994 to 2003, the family has had £15.6m of dividends before tax.
Michael Oglesby
Bruntwood Estates
The landmark St James building in Manchester is the latest addition to Michael Oglesby’s portfolio. He now owns 14% of the offices in the city centre, through his Bruntwood operation. It was in 1970 that Oglesby moved from Scunthorpe to Manchester, forming Bruntwood five years later. He chairs the Cheadle-based group, while son Chris is managing director.
Oglesby, 65, owns all of Bruntwood Estates either directly or through Abney Investments. In the year to September 2003, Abney made £10.8m profit on £37.4m sales. We value it on its £89.2m net assets. Other smaller but separate Bruntwood operations take the total net assets owned by the Oglesby family to around £121m, with £15.6m profit. In all, with other assets, the Oglesby family is worth perhaps £130m.
Robert Rayne
London Merchant Securities
The death of Lord Rayne last year robbed London of one of its shrewdest property developers. After war service with the RAF, Rayne turned his family’s tailoring operation into a property company and never looked back. London Merchant Securities was heavily involved in pioneering developments on the City fringe.
His son Robert, 55, is chief executive at LMS, and the family stake is now worth around £71m (including his father’s estate). Lord Rayne left £119.6m in his British will, which excluded assets in France. Adding this to Robert’s own wealth should take the family to perhaps £130m, allowing for tax.
William Ainscough
Langtree Group
For the past 31 years, everything William Ainscough has touched seemed to turn to gold. In 1973 he founded the Wainhomes housebuilder. After merging with two other builders in 1989, he floated the enlarged Wigan-based group five years later with a price tag of £106m. Fed up with stock market indifference to the company, Ainscough took Wainhomes private in 1999. Within two years, he had sold the company to quoted housebuilder Wilson Connolly, netting £44m for his stake.
Ainscough also owns Langtree Group, a developer with a healthy £56.5m of net assets in the year to June 2003 and schemes under way in Stoke, Liverpool, Rotherham, Barnsley and Doncaster. And his housing ambitions have not ended. Ainscough bought the old Wainhomes South West operation. The renamed Wain Group made a £16.6m profit in 2002/03 and is worth at least £50m.
His passion outside work is a collection of vintage touring cars. Allowing for tax, Ainscough, 56, must easily be worth £126m.
|
|
||
|
No |
Name |
Wealth (£m) |
|
7 |
John Whittaker |
929 |
|
11 |
Trevor Hemmings |
700 |
|
28 |
Peter Jones |
401 |
|
59 |
Alan Murphy |
170 |
|
60 |
Brian Scowcroft |
163 |
|
71 |
Michael Oglesby |
130 |
|
73 |
William Ainscough |
126 |
|
83 |
Susan Prescott |
110 |
|
97 |
John Hindle |
95 |
|
101 |
David Russell |
90 |
Bill Gredley
Unex Corporation
“Anxious father seeks capable person to care for two children. The position has become available due to their stepmother leaving rather abruptly.” So read the ad Bill Gredley placed in Horse and Hound, when his second wife Rowena walked out. It worked – she returned to the Victorian mansion and 850-acre stud farm that racehorse owner Gredley calls home, and the pair are still together.
Business is good, too. Unex Holdings, the East Anglian property group, saw its 2002/03 profits rise to £1.9m. But its net assets fell from £121m to £103m. The business is owned by the eccentric Gredley and his clan.
In 1992 the racehorse breeder’s first wife, Sarah, died after a long battle with cancer, leaving him £15m in her will. Gredley’s most famous horse, User Friendly, won the Epsom Oaks in 1992. His racing interests, a £13m dividend payment in 2002/03 and the smaller companies we can see, with net assets of £2m, take Gredley, 61, and his family to £125m.
Chris Marshall
Marshall Holdings
Chris Marshall, 65, has built his business into a leading developer in the North. His Leeds-based Marshall Holdings, started by his great-grandfather, saw profits rise sharply to £17.3m on £126m sales in 2002. With a strong balance sheet and £90m of net assets, the business is worth perhaps £120m. We add £5m for past dividends (including £1m in 2001) and other assets.
Michael and Robert Slowe
J Leon & Co
The Slowe cousins Michael, 69, and Robert, 67, are directors of J Leon, a family-owned property investment and holding company. Based in London, the company and family are very low profile. In the year to March 2003, J Leon made £5.6m profit but sharply increased its net assets to nearly £118m. The company is easily worth its net assets. We add £5m for dividends and family assets.
Sir Robert Ogden
Ogden Group
Barely a week goes by without the sports pages reporting on the hopes of Sir Robert Ogden for one of his 30 National Hunt horses in an important race. But there is another side to Ogden, knighted for his charitable work in 2001.
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. Ogden later went into the site clearance and demolition business before branching out into property.
An early investor in London’s Docklands when 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.
Ogden now runs a number of companies from his Yorkshire base. His two main companies – A Ogden & Sons and Ogden Properties – had £36m of net assets in 2002. Other companies add another £4m of net assets. But with many other private interests and the fine collection of horses, Ogden at 68 is conservatively worth £120m.
Viscount Petersham
Stanhope Gardens
Living quietly in Yorkshire, Viscount Petersham is the heir to the Earl of Harrington and owner of some prime acres in South Kensington around Stanhope Gardens. His daughter is married to Viscount Linley, son of the late Princess Margaret. His London property assets are owned via a Bermuda holding company and have been valued at about £100m. The assets of his two main companies, Elvaston Investments and Elvaston Gardens, rose to £9m in 2002. In all we value Petersham, 59, slightly higher this year at £120m, but he could go a lot higher once we get a better grip on the London acres.
Phyllis Somers
Neutral Holdings
Supporting the Great Ormond Street Children’s Charity appeal or a new £5.5m research building at Southampton General Hospital are just some of the good deeds being carried out by Phyllis Somers, 82. She lives quietly in Jersey, where she is regarded as a formidable business brain. No doubt she learnt that from her late husband, Nat, who died in 1998. He had two passions – flying and business. He learnt to fly in 1936 and later owned airports. Real success came in 1988, when he sold Southampton airport for £50m. His numerous property deals helped build his fortune to £120m.
His widow is a member of the Webber family that used to own electrical appliance manufacturer Pifco. She has a small property company, PS Webber, which had just £72,000 net assets in 2002. With her continued charitable work, we stick at the £120m Somers inherited from her husband.
Sir David Garrard
Minerva
Minerva, the property company run by Sir David Garrard, 65, is up for sale after recently announcing that it had received a number of takeover approaches, thought to come from private equity group Blackstone, Australians Multiplex and Westfield, and US developer Tishman Speyer.
Garrard, a near 40-year veteran of the property sector, and co-director/shareholder Andrew Rosenfeld (88), hope to build a 1m sq ft tower in the City, but Minerva lacks the firepower to fund the scheme. It hopes that someone will come forward with the same aspiration to own a rather large tower.
The takeover interest in Minerva has helped push its share price up. Garrard’s stake is now worth £86m. Other wealth, past deals and £6m of net assets he owns in three smaller companies take him to £116m.
Peter Prowting
Prowting Investments
In June the Prowting family made £24m when the quoted Estates & General group was sold to London property tycoon Leo Noe (44). But Peter’s main fortune comes from construction. In 1948, the young Prowting became a director of the construction company that bears the family name. He was made chairman of Uxbridge-based Prowting in 1955 and 33 years later floated it on the stock market.
Prowting’s family and trusts sold up in 2002 to the rival Westbury group netting £88.5m. Past dividends and other assets (including £5.9m net assets in Prowting Investments) take the now retired Prowting, 79, and his family to £115m.
Irvine Sellar
Sellar Properties
The “shard of glass”, as it has been nicknamed, set to rise above London Bridge, is proof of the remarkable recovery of Irvine Sellar.
Thirteen years ago, his property group went bust and he lost £28m. Now he has planning permission for Europe’s tallest building, the 66-storey London Bridge Tower, rising 1,016ft above the mainline station. Once completed at a cost of around £350m, the tower should be worth between £750m and £1bn.
Sellar has financial partners, including Simon Halabi (20) and the Mortstedt family (56) of CLS Holdings, each taking a one-third stake. Not bad for a former market trader, who turned into the king of Carnaby Street fashion before selling up in 1980 and moving into property.
We can see around a dozen companies he owns with £11m of net assets, including Sellar Properties. He has acquired hotels, offices and a Manchester shopping centre, taking his investment portfolio value to a net £70m. With his development portfolio, his joint venture portfolio with the Civil Service Sports Council to develop a chain of health and fitness clubs, plus his homes in London and Surrey, Sellar, 66, is now easily worth £111m.
Manny Davidson
BL Davidson
In August 2001, Manny Davidson, 73, joined with giant British Land to take over his own quoted Asda Properties, which concentrated on retail warehousing and central London properties. Today the two are involved in BL Davidson, with £204m of net assets in 2003, when it made a £5.3m profit. The Davidson family’s 50% is worth £102m.
Davidson also had a £2.9m stake in Leopold Joseph merchant bank, which was recently taken over. We add £5m for other wealth such as the Putney Bridge restaurant and Wolfe Securities, taking the Davidson family to £110m.
Susan Prescott
Ethel Austin Properties Holdings
Merseyside-based retailer Ethel Austin is considering a £150m float after revealing a 158% profit hike last year. For the Austin family, represented on this list by Susan Prescott, 52, that would be good news.
The business was started in the 1930s by Prescott’s grandmother Ethel Austin, in Liverpool when she sold wool from her home, later opening a single shop and expanding into children’s clothes. In 2002, the family sold the business for £55m to a management team, but kept a 7.5% stake. The Austins also kept their extensive property assets after the buyout. The family is involved with local developer Stephen Beetham, who built the successful residential scheme, the Beetham Tower in the city.
In all we can see two Ethel Austin property companies, with £93m of net assets in 2002. Adding the proceeds from the buyout and the 7.5% stake in the retailer (now worth £11.2m) should take the Austin family to over £150m. But we fear there could be some double counting in the property shareholding and so only raise the Austin family to £110m.
Martin Birrane
Peer Group
Knowing a thing or two about racing cars has helped Martin Birrane, 69, who has 47 wins under his belt as a saloon car racer.
He was able to buy famous racing car maker Lola Cars from the receiver in 1997, and turn it round to the point where it has just seen its chassis selected for a new racing operation – Formula A1, which is planned to compete with F1. All the cars will be of the same design and there will be 30 of them – so it should prove lucrative for Lola and Birrane.
An Irish property magnate from County Mayo, where his father ran a tailoring business, Birrane travelled the world after school before marrying at 22 and emigrating to Canada. His wife did not like Canada, though he developed a taste for real estate there. He returned to Britain and started motor racing as well as dealing in property. The 1970s were a difficult time but he survived, and his Peer Group has around £63m of net assets in its latest 2002 accounts.
He has pumped around £20m into Lola and diversified into new areas. He also owns the Mondello Park racing track in County Kildare, on which he has spent around £5m, turning it into a modestly profitable venture. With other interests and assets, including a security and contract cleaning company, Birrane is worth £105m.
Heinrich Feldman
Inremco 26
Heinrich Feldman, 68, is a very low-profile London property owner and trader with more than 50 directorships. His main holding company is Inremco 26, which was incorporated in 1983. It made a £2.3m profit in 2002/03, when its net assets were £74.8m. In addition there is Castledock, owned by a trust company, which has £20.9m of net assets. We can also see Feldman stakes in a host of smaller property companies worth over £9m. With other assets, we reckon Feldman is now easily worth £105m.
Eric Gadsden
WE Black
Profits rose sharply at WE Black in 2002, and the Hertfordshire developer looks in fine fettle. It made £11.1m profit on £22m sales – a 50.7% profit margin. With £59m of net assets and a solid balance sheet, it is worth £70m.
Eric Gadsden, as owner, took little out of the company (£1m dividends in 1997). But he had a £1m stake in Newport Holdings, the quoted property company recently taken over by David Pearl (131), and another £30m of net assets in brick and property firms. With his racing interests, at 59, Gadsden is worth £105m.
Andrew Rosenfeld
Minerva
Andrew Rosenfeld, 42, a chartered surveyor by training, is regarded as one of the brightest young stars in property. Together with Sir David Garrard (80), he founded then floated property group Minerva on the stock market in 1996, and worked on plans for a tower in the City and a huge Croydon scheme. The company is now up for sale with a £600m price tag. As a result, Rosenfeld’s stake is now worth £72m. He has other assets, as he told the Sunday Times in 1998, of around £30m in trusts and other family interests. We value him at around £102m.
Cyril Dennis
Poetbridge Investments
Cyril Dennis, 60, used to own a half-share in an Essex housebuilder, which he sold in 1987. After a spell advising Berisford, he built up his own property business with a portfolio spread across the UK. In 1994, Dennis sold 75% of it to Legal & General for £116m, netting a profit of £50m. His Capital & Provident is behind a 2m sq ft mixed-use proposal in London Docklands, called Peruvian Wharf. We now put his fortune at around £100m.
David Kirch
Channel Hotels & Properties
Low-profile Jersey player Kirch, 68, has been busy. Last year he sold his stake in the small quoted property company Newport Holdings to David Pearl (131), netting around £8m for his stake. In August he bagged another property group, Property & Acquisitions Management, where his stake was worth around £12m. His £69.5m bid for the business was recommended by the PAM board. PAM has a £200m property portfolio.
Kirch made his fortune in London residential property in the 1960s, selling his last portfolio in 1988 for £30m. He now runs Channel Hotels and Properties from the island. We have not seen any accounts recently but after that deal, the net assets rose to nearly £85m. Kirch has been involved in a bewildering array of investments and takeovers, ranging from leisure to healthcare. Outside his present takeover moves, he has a further £10m of stakes in 13 different quoted companies. Out of all this we are safe to value him at £100m.
Anton Bilton
Raven Group
A busy time for 40-year-old entrepreneur Anton Bilton. On the domestic front, having ditched It Girl Tara Palmer Tomkinson, he has just married American actress Lisa B. On the business front, his audacious takeover of the quoted Swan Hill construction group and efforts to achieve a quick sale and profit have yet to bear fruit. Using new vehicle Raven Mount to take over Swan Hill, he then sought buyers, and came close when British Land ran its slide rule over the business. But pension fund liabilities put off John Ritblat. Raven Mount shares have fallen, and Bilton’s stake is now worth £1.5m. But he still has considerable assets elsewhere, including his Raven Group, with £11.6m net assets in 2002/03.
He is the grandson of Percy Bilton, who died in 1983 after building the quoted Percy Bilton operation, which was taken over by Slough Estates after a bitter battle in 1998 for £270m. The family’s 29.4% stake in Bilton was worth £79.4m. With these family assets added to Anton’s business and personal assets (including a magnificent £2m-plus country mansion), a £100m valuation for the Bilton clan seems reasonable.
The Earl of Portsmouth
Grainger Trust
It is a case of all quiet on the litigation front for the Earl of Portsmouth, who has made a name for himself in recent years helping defendants such as former Tory MP Neil Hamilton in his libel battle with Mohammed Al Fayed.
Portsmouth can afford it. He has a shrewd business brain. With a 3,000-acre estate near Basingstoke, he has sold land off for development over the years. He now has a £47.4m stake in the Grainger Trust property group, whose shares are riding high (122). In 2002 he sold shares worth over £9m. With his estate, the Grainger stake, share proceeds, and his art collection, Portsmouth is worth £100m.
Maurice Wohl
United Real Property Trust
Maurice Wohl was a very low-key property developer in London after the second world war, building up United Real and floating it in 1961. By the mid-1970s he had retired to Switzerland. In 1986, United Real was taken over in a £117m deal by the late Tony Clegg, a brilliant property dealer. Wohl made around £60m from the deal.
Since then he has been a huge benefactor to charities, and invested £5m in the abortive bid for British American Tobacco by Sir James Goldsmith, Kerry Packer and Jacob Rothschild in 1989. With some hefty private investments, at 87, he is easily worth £100m.
Charles Yeates
WS Yeates
Busy working on another large office complex he owns in Leicester for the same blue-chip client who has taken another of his properties, Charles Yeates is relaxed about the state of the economy. He has no borrowings and his various properties in Britain and Spain are all fully let and producing good yields in a low-inflation environment.
Yeates, now 68, started in business at the age of 22 after leaving the RAF, becoming a leading dealer in buses and coaches. Today his Loughborough-based company WS Yeates is involved in property and fine art. In 2002, the company made around £279,000 profit on sales of £1.25m. But it has net assets of over £21m. Yeates has other overseas property assets and art. We bullishly stake him at £100m.
Nigel Wray
Prestbury Investment Holdings
Nigel Wray and partner Nick Leslau (157) sold a batch of buildings through their Prestbury operation in June for £263m. With the property market seen as hotter than in the late 1980s, it is clearly the right time for Wray to move. He has been described as the Warren Buffett of Britain, having made a series of shrewd moves since the early 1980s in the worlds of property, media and communications that have earned him a fortune.
We can see 15 stakes in quoted companies held by Wray or recently taken over, worth in total £31m. The largest is Domino’s Pizza UK and Ireland, where his stake is worth £15m. But share sales and a host of unquoted investments such as rugby club Saracens, with £1.8m net assets, and his half-share of Prestbury (with £44m net assets in 2002) should easily take him to £100m. We expect to see the fruits of the multimillion-pound profit on the Prestbury property sales trickle through in its 2004 accounts. Wray, 56, will go higher as a result.
Albert Mucklow
A&J Mucklow
A chartered surveyor by trade, Albert Mucklow, 68, has just retired as chairman of quoted Midlands property group A&J Mucklow. His son Rupert (pictured left) has taken over the reins of the firm, started in 1933 by Albert’s father and uncle who launched the housebuilding operation.
In the second world war they carried out earth-moving contracts to build airfields. The company floated in 1962 and ceased housebuilding in the 1990s to concentrate on property.
Jack Petchey (43) has been buying shares recently and now has a 13% stake. The Mucklow family has a 44% stake now worth £84m. Past salaries and dividends add £9m.
John Hindle
Brookhouse Properties
John Hindle, 69, chairs Brookhouse Properties, a Sale-based industrial and residential developer working on schemes from London Docklands to Glasgow.
In 2001, Brookhouse’s profits came in at £8m while it had £92.6m net assets. In 2002, the group was reorganised but results were not consolidated. However, we add another £2m to take account of small increases in net asset value we can see, taking the Hindle family to £95m. We reckon that the family still owns the business via the Aggregate Trust, which now owns Brookhouse.
|
|
||
|
No |
Name |
Wealth (£m) |
|
32 |
Robert Edmiston |
380 |
|
39 |
Don & Roy Richardson |
298 |
|
42 |
Tony Gallagher |
275 |
|
50 |
Grahame Whateley |
200 |
|
56 |
Sir Euan Anstruther-Gough- Calthorpe |
175 |
|
63 |
Sir Jack Hayward |
150 |
|
66 |
The Clarke family |
148 |
|
70 |
Michael Horton |
131 |
|
96 |
Albert Mucklow |
96 |
|
112 |
Resham Lally |
75 |
Peter Klimt
Dawnay Day International
Peter Klimt and Guy Naggar (=97, below) are two of the most formidable financiers in London. It is 22 years since they started working together, in which time they have built up Dawnay Day into a leading property-to-financial services group. It has combined gross assets of more than £1.5bn and a net worth exceeding £250m, according to a recent financial report. A string of deals this year includes buying Paramount Hotels Group for £215m with Share Capital and building a stake in retailer Austin Reed.
Certainly Klimt, a solicitor by trade, has stakes in at least eight property companies we can see. These include Starlight Investments, Sologlade and Armstrong Properties. The net assets attributable to Klimt and his family in those eight firms total £87.5m. With other assets and property, we value Klimt, 58, and his family at £95m, though some reckon he could be well north of £100m.
Guy Naggar
Dawnay Day
French banker Guy Naggar created banks in France and Switzerland before becoming deputy chairman of Charterhouse Bank in London. In 1981, he bought the Dawnay Day bank, a virtually moribund operation. With partner Peter Klimt he has built it into a private property and financial services group, which the Financial Times recently valued at over £250m. Naggar is joint owner with Klimt.
Certainly we can see around £46m of net assets in a clutch of companies – Sologlade, Dawnay Day Properties, Wordrapid and Starlight Investments – owned by Naggar, 63, or his trusts. But taking the Financial Times as our cue (with a dash of caution), we value Naggar at £95m – the same level as his partner, Peter Klimt.
Thomas Jennings
Cusp
We raise last year’s valuation for the Jennings family, which owns Cusp, a property developer worth its £33.8m net assets in its 2002 accounts. The family also owns Rotary Group, an electrical and engineering contractor based in Northern Ireland. Thomas Jennings, 50, is now chairman of the business started by his father in 1954. It is easily worth £60m on the back of £6.4m profit on £110m sales in 2002.
David Russell
Property Alliance
In the 1980s, Rochdale-born David Russell built up and then sold the Farouche Kitchens company. Together with Brian Kennedy, Russell became a pioneer of direct sales. By 29, he had sold the business for £12m. A few years of high living in the jetset followed.
Today Russell, 48, spends his time on his property and construction business, his four children, and politics. His Property Alliance is busy in Manchester’s office market. A £12m development in King Street is under way. In 2003, it paid £3.5m for the 38,000 sq ft Harvester House office block at 37 Peter Street. And at Deansgate, the company will redevelop a 42,000 sq ft office building.
The Russell empire also includes office and leisure developments in Oxford, Chorley and Blackburn. Property Alliance made £2.2m profit on £9.8m sales in 2002/03. Russell owns it and we value him at £90m, but it could be a lot more.
David Gabbay
O&H Capital
David Gabbay runs a property company based in London, with strong Middle East links. O&H Capital made £9.8m profit on £40m sales in the year to August 2002. It has £114.2m net assets and we value the operation on that figure. But Gabbay, 60, who has around half the shares with trusts, has other assets, including the trendy London Hemple hotel. We value his O&H stake at £57m. In all we reckon Gabbay must be worth around £85m with past salaries (over £5m in 2001, for instance) and dividends.
Robin Clark
Taylor Clark
The son of the late property developer Robert Clark, Robin, 66, now runs the family firm, renamed Taylor Clark. The London-based company has a strong track record in Scotland and the West Midlands. About 43.3% of the company is owned by a charity. In the year to March 2003, profits rose marginally to £936,000 on sales down sharply at £12.9m. But it has £148m of net assets and a high credit rating. Using the assets as a valuation, the Clarks’ 56.7% is worth £84m.
John Marston
Marston Properties
The Marston family has been in building and property since 1895. In 1938, they began converting four derelict cottages into holiday flats. Out of this, a hotel business was born. In the early 1980s it was performing badly but a new managing director was appointed and the hotels were revitalised.
In 2002, the hotels were demerged from the property business and continue to boom. Kent-based Marston Hotels made £8.4m profit on £44.3m sales in the year to March 2003. It is easily worth £70m on these figures. John Marston, 69, and his family have around 80% of the shares, valued at £56m. Marston Properties Holdings – with £29m of net assets – is at least 75% owned by the family, giving a £22m stake. Marston Hotels also paid out a £12.1m dividend in 2001 and £5m in 2002. In all, after tax, this is an £83m family.
Everard Goodman
Tops Estates
Everard Goodman, now 72, 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. He subsequently moved into property and floated Tops Estates in 1983.
Goodman’s direct stake and trusts in Tops are worth £72m and he dominates the business. He is currently embroiled in a battle with rival USS and Leeds city council over redevelopment of one of Tops’ largest assets, Leeds Shopping Plaza.
He also has a £3m stake in Trust of Property, a quoted investment vehicle. Other assets (£2.5m of them in small companies) and dividends take him easily to £82m.
Duncan Sinclair
Mountview Estates
An accountant by training, Duncan Sinclair, 56, is chairman of quoted property dealer Mountview Estates, in which his family has a major stake. He became secretary of the north London-based firm in 1977. The family’s 50.7% stake is now worth around £77m. We add another £5m for net assets in smaller private companies such as Ossian Investors and Sinclair Estates.
Sir Henry & Philip Warner
Warner Estate Holdings
After distinguished wartime service with the Scots Guards after D-Day, Sir Henry inherited the baronetcy from his late father in 1955.
The Warner family are substantial property owners in London through their quoted Warner Estate Holdings, but have recently been concentrating outside the capital, setting up funds such as the Agora Shopping Centre vehicle and the Skipper regional office fund. Sir Henry, 82, is no longer on the board of the company, run by his son, Philip, but the family retains a £71.5m stake.
We add another £10m for estates and other assets such as the Brettenham Trust. However, since last year’s list our sources have suggested that we may be undervaluing the family by a factor of perhaps five. As yet we can’t see it, but we’d love to get the proof.
Rodger Dudding
Lonsto (International)
The son of a naval officer, Rodger Dudding took a craft apprenticeship in naval engineering from 1954 to 1959 at Chatham. After his naval career was cut short by injury, Dudding went into business before launching Lonsto (International), which makes and installs queue management systems for banks and supermarkets. The business is still thriving.
But Dudding is also Britain’s king of lugs – or lock-up garages. He has over 11,000 of them and is aiming for 20,000. He realised that the garage business was fragmented and not regarded as serious, and moved to change that. Today, he is also busy with small developments of garage sites, turning them into badly needed housing.
At 66, Dudding’s various firms and family trusts have net assets that now total £80m.
John McCarthy
McCarthy & Stone
“Keep it in the family” must be the motto of 64-year-old John McCarthy, co-founder of McCarthy & Stone, the Bournemouth-based retirement home builder. McCarthy was already a successful developer when in 1976 he spotted a couple of lines in a government green paper suggesting that developers should be encouraged to provide sheltered accommodation for the elderly. He set up McCarthy & Stone, which was floated on the stock market in 1982. It had a rocky ride after the sector slumped and a spate of bad press, but then took off again.
It was revealed in June last year that he had backed a plan by his two sons, Spencer and Clinton McCarthy, to bid for the operation. The bid was rebuffed by the directors and McCarthy stood down as chairman. He retained a 13% stake in the company until this May, when he sold it for £74.4m.
Polo-mad McCarthy also has a Wiltshire estate and at least £3m of other business assets we can see. With past dividends taking him to £80m after tax, it should make a nice retirement nest egg.
Paul Rooney
Arun Estate Agencies
Paul Rooney, 57, is one of Britain’s top estate agents. His Arun Estate Agencies, based in Horsham, West Sussex, turned a stunning rise in profits, from £5m to £10m on sales of £47m in 2003/04. Even today, the business should be worth £70m. Past salaries and dividends (£6m dividends in 2003/04) take Rooney to £80m easily.
Martin Myers
Mountgrange Capital
A noted follower of the turf, Martin Myers is also one of London’s shrewdest property players, who has been buying and selling property companies for years. As a chartered surveyor, he knows all there is to know about property and made his first £10m with the sale of the quoted Imry operation in 1989. With Manish Chande (220), he later built up property services company Trillium, with £70m backing from Goldman Sachs. They sold it to Land Securities for £300m. Late last year, the duo sold a Lincoln shopping park for £90m that they had bought 18 months previously for £67m. Myers had 43% of the company involved in the deal.
He has invested heavily in Lambourn and owns the stables and gallops now used by former jockey Jamie Osborne as his training establishment. We can see several companies where Myers or his trusts have substantial stakes, the largest being 52% of Chester Holdings (UK) with £55m net assets. In all, at 63, he must easily be worth a conservative £79m.
Resham Lally
Bilston Properties
Resham Lally, 64, is managing director of Bilston Properties, a West Midlands management consultancy and property developer. The company, which was incorporated in 1984, is wholly owned by Lally and his family. He also has numerous other interests in the UK, US and India. His British interests are worth over £10m, while his US car dealerships and property are worth over £40m. His Indian assets are worth £10m, while property stakes add another £10m. He has been adding new dealerships in America and is now worth around £75m, all told.
James Leavesley
Evans Property Holdings
James Leavesley, 74, has stakes in two leading family-owned property companies. At Evans Property Holdings, dominated by the Evans family, his family has a 9% stake. We value the company (where he is still a director) on its £228.5m net assets in 2003/04. The family stake is worth £20m. His company JD Leavesley & Co also has 14.3% of St Modwen, the quoted Midlands developer founded by Sir Stan Clarke. That stake is worth over £50m. With other assets such as a pig rearing operation, we say he has to be worth £75m.
The Morris family
Woodgavil Properties
The Morris family owns a property empire that started after the war as a housebuilder. Based in Surrey, the family owns at least 12 separate companies we can identify, including Woodgavil Properties and Exe Valley Investments. In all, these companies have net assets of over £30m. But these and other family assets have huge redevelopment potential, which puts a £75m value on the assets and the Morris family.
Ardeshir Naghshineh
Targetfollow Group
Former civil engineer Ardeshir Naghshineh, 52, founded Norwich-based Targetfollow in 1992. The group now controls assets of £400m, including Wembley Point in London and St James Court in Warrington. Though it lost £9.2m in 2002/03, Targetfollow has £62.1m of net assets. It is owned by Naghshineh and a series of trusts that we assume are his family trusts. We can see another half-dozen smaller and separate property groups with around £13m of net assets. A £75m valuation is right.
Judith and Fergus Wilson
Burwood Property Co
Former maths teacher Judith Wilson, now 54, gave up her job in 1992 to concentrate on property. Working with her husband, Fergus, 56, also a former maths teacher, she bought houses that they rent out to young professionals in the Ashford area of Kent. She now has around 465 properties worth about £75m, according to press reports in early 2003. Despite little evidence of any asset wealth in 36 companies, including Burwood Properties, we stick with that £75m figure, but in a difficult residential lettings market that figure may be too generous.
Ron Wood
Ron Wood Developments
The continuing fate of Manchester United will be of interest to Ron Wood, 55, who has 1.9m shares in the premiership giant, worth over £5m. But he is likely to back Sir Alex Ferguson in any battle. Among his directorships is the intriguingly named Alex Ferguson Testimonial Year Company Limited.
Bury-based Wood sold greetings cards on commission as a teenager. In 1975, he started his own business, which became Ron Wood Greetings Cards. He sold it for £90m to a management team in 1996, though re-investing some of the money in the renamed business, Birthdays.
Last year’s sale of Birthdays for “10s of millions” of pounds will have netted Wood some more millions. But in recent years, he has largely been involved in property through his Ron Wood Developments, building some large developments around Manchester. This business only shows £507,000 of net assets, but with his sale proceeds and United stake, Wood is easily worth £75m after tax.
Martin & Daniel Tannen
Tannen Group
North London-based property group Tannen saw its profits fall sharply from £3.9m to £1.6m in 2002/03. But its net assets rose to £48m. We value the business on its net asset figures. Martin, 49, Daniel, 47, and family trusts own all the shares.
We add another £20m for other Tannen business assets we can see, including Gladehurst Properties with £14m of net assets. We also add another £5m for dividends and salaries (including £6.8m in 2000/01), taking the Tannen family to perhaps £73m after tax.
Michael Herbert
Donegall Place Investments
Herbel Restaurants, based in Belfast, holds the largest Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in Europe and also acts as a franchise for Haagen-Dazs ice cream. Founded in 1981, the business is owned by Michael and Lesley Herbert, and made £963,000 profit on £23m sales in 2002. But it does have net assets of £10m and we value the business on that figure.
We add another £500,000 for past salaries to the Herberts, plus another £61.2m for the net assets of Donegall Place Investments, a property group owned by 47-year-old Michael Herbert.
Michael Hunt
Hippo Golf (Europe)
Michael Hunt’s main business, Hippo Golf (Europe), saw its profits fall slightly to £757,000 on £10m sales in 2002. We can also see another £3m of net assets in several other smaller businesses.
But the manufacturer of golf equipment – worth perhaps £7m – is but part of 70-year-old Hunt’s portfolio, for Hunt made his fortune initially helping the late Octav Botnar build Nissan UK into one of Britain’s most successful car dealers. By the late 1980s, the Sussex-based business was making huge profits and was worth more than £1bn. It generated huge dividends and Hunt had a 13% stake before the whole operation unravelled.
Our sources indicate that he has a huge property portfolio to add to these businesses and that is why he makes this list. We value him at £72m.
Gerard Versteegh
Versteegh
Swedish-born Gerard Versteegh, 44, is managing director of a Chelsea-based property investor Versteegh. In 2003, it made £893,000 profit on £17.8m sales, a sharp fall on 2002. But after a revaluation of its property portfolio, the net assets rose to £72m and we value the company on that figure.
It is owned by Gerard Versteegh Holdings, which is in turn owned by two Jersey-based trusts. We assume the beneficial owner must be the Versteegh family, and we value the family on that net asset figure.
Robert & Rupert Dickinson
Grainger Trust
A leading business figure in the North East, Robert Dickinson, 70, sits on the board of numerous local companies, including property group Grainger Trust, of which he is chairman. The Dickinson family has a £65m stake in the business, held both beneficially and in trust and it is run by Robert’s son Rupert (left).
Other assets such as a family-owned company, Cross House Buildings (with £1.2m net assets), and property should take the Dickinson family to £70m easily.
Joey Esfandi
Winglaw Group
London-based Esfandi set up property business Winglaw in 1980 at the age of 29 and 12 years later became chief executive of the quoted Dwyer Estates. He sold Winglaw in 2000 to Warner Estates for over £100m, netting £52m from the deal. He had already taken Dwyer private in 1998 and continues in property development.
In October 2003 he brought in developer Rick de Blaby of Countryside Properties to join him to build up Dwyer. With his sale proceeds and his stake in Dwyer, we value Esfandi, 53, at £70m.
John Guthrie
Broadland Properties
John Guthrie, 68, a chartered surveyor by training, is chairman and managing director of Scarborough-based Broadland Properties. He owns all the shares either directly or through family trusts. The business, which was started in 1950, saw profits fall from £745,000 to £241,000 on sales of £23.2m in the year to September 2003. But we value it on its £66m net assets. Other assets such as White Rose Finance take the family to perhaps £70m.
|
|
||
|
No |
Name |
Wealth (£m) |
|
13 |
Eddie Healey |
600 |
|
20 |
Paul Sykes |
500 |
|
48 |
Michael Evans |
236 |
|
74 |
Chris Marshall |
125 |
|
77 |
Sir Robert Ogden |
120 |
|
77 |
Viscount Petersham |
120 |
|
122 |
John Guthrie |
70 |
|
122 |
Tony Marcus |
70 |
|
122 |
Kevin McCabe |
70 |
|
122 |
Edward Ziff |
70 |
Kevin McCabe
Scarborough Property Group
The lure of the Blades has endured throughout Kevin McCabe’s life. Born close to Bramall Lane, at 56, he now chairs Sheffield United and no doubt hopes to see the club make it to the premiership next season.
McCabe, a quantity surveyor by trade, started working for Bovis in 1964 at 16. He joined the Teesland property group in 1971 and nine years later formed the Scarborough Property Co. In 1989 McCabe led the management buyout of Teesland and in 1996 the business merged with Scarborough, only to demerge four years later. Teesland acquired a stock market listing in 2002 by way of a reverse takeover of the then ailing Semple Cochrane, a Scottish engineering group.
McCabe chairs the group, renamed Teesland and now a fund manager, where he has a £4.5m stake. Teesland has recently acquired a 13% stake in rival property fund manager, Property Fund Management.
His family still owns all of the Scarborough Property Group, which made £7.7m profit on £56.8m sales in the year to February 2003. We reckon the company is worth around £50m on these figures. McCabe, who has extensive interests in Scotland and Yorkshire, has more than 300 directorships. We add another £20m for his wealth here including a £2m stake in quoted housebuilder Fairbriar, where he is also chairman.
Alan & Edward Lee
Princeton Investments
The Lee brothers are the sons of Arnold Lee, one of London’s great developers of the 1950s. He built up the Imry Property empire and in 1987, before the stock market crash, sold his family’s 39% stake for just over £20m.
Since then his sons Alan, 47, and Edward, 45, have been quietly running the family’s property interests via Princeton Investments.
Though it only showed a £510,000 profit on £1.3m sales (what margins!) in 2002, Princeton has had some impressive assets. In 1989, the Financial Times reported it had a hefty £150m portfolio, £110m of which was abroad. In July, the Lees showed their hand in Britain when Princeton Investments teamed up with Patron Capital Partners to buy the 73,000 sq ft Hagley House tower in Birmingham for £7.1m. In all we value the Lee family at £70m.
Tony Marcus
Thornfield Holdings
Veteran Leeds property man Tony Marcus owns ThornfieldHoldings after starting out in sandwich bars. Marcus teamed up with the Bank of Scotland and Lehman Brothers in early 2002 to form a joint venture, Thornfield Properties, which was valued at around £250m at the time. Marcus, 57, and his family own a 28% stake in Thornfield Properties, worth perhaps £70m. It is heavily involved in town centre redevelopments across the UK. Cautiously we stick with a £70m valuation for Marcus.
Mel Morris
uDate.com
The former partner of Irvine Sellar (82), Mel Morris has emerged as one of Britain’s most successful serial entrepreneurs in recent years. In 1989, the Derbyshire-based Morris sold his stake in property group Ford Sellar Morris to Sellar for £15.2m. By then Morris had started an IT company called Prometrics, which was sold in 1997 for £10m and an earn-out. He left in 1998 to form internet dating company uDate. Early in 2003 the Derby-based company was sold for £92m. Morris, 48, is worth £70m, at least.
Edward Ziff
Town Centre Securities
Virtually every tycoon in the property world sought to take over the late Arnold Ziff’s company, Stylo, over the last 44 years. Bidders came and went, seen off by the redoubtable Ziff, who died in June, shortly after retiring as chairman of the shoes-to-property group. Stylo, headquartered in a Yorkshire stone blockhouse in Bradford, is the Ziff family’s corporate fortress, by virtue of a complex share structure devised by Stylo’s merchant banker of the day when the company went public in 1935. The business was founded by Ziff’s grandfather, his sister and their brothers – all children of Russian émigrés – in 1918.
Stylo’s prime assets include freehold premises in most of the best high streets in Britain, which is why so many property companies have tried to muscle in. The Ziff family infuriates them by operating conservatively, worrying less about profits than building net worth and maximising reserves in case of rainy days. It works, with Stylo making £6.8m profit on £209m sales in 2002/03.
It was in the 1960s that the Ziff family moved into property with the separate Town Centre Securities, where the family stake is now worth around £58m. With their Stylo holding and other assets, the low-key family, now led by Arnold’s 44-year-old son Edward, is worth at least £70m. But it won’t be the same without Arnold to guide them.
John Ritblat
British Land
“John is still enjoying himself and the business is going well so he wants to stay,” one friend of John Ritblat said in July. So the 69-year-old chairman of British Land – already committed to relinquishing the role of chief executive to former Abbey financial director Stephen Hester shortly – has no plans to give up the chairmanship and retire.
And with Ritblat’s track record, no British Land shareholder should want him to leave. He has overseen the expansion of the company from £27m of assets in 1971 to £10.6bn today, and British Land now manages the biggest portfolio of any quoted British property company.
One of his most recent moves is to take the company into the residential market. British Land announced in May that it plans to double its residential portfolio to £500m over the next two years.
The son of a dentist, Ritblat initially trained as an estate agent and then started up his own agency. In 1970 he reversed his Union Property Holdings into British Land and the rest is history. He has survived three property downturns, and his ability to call the market correctly has made him a legend to British Land shareholders.
With the shares riding high, Ritblat’s direct stake is worth around £23m, while his son Jamie runs Delancey Estates, taken private in 2001, when the Ritblats had 7%. In 2002/03 it had £250m net assets, valuing the family stake at £17.5m. Options, other business assets including Chardwick Investments and an art collection – Ritblat is a generous patron to the arts and was appointed chairman of the trustees of the Wallace Collection in London – keep the family at a conservative £70m.
David Pearl
Structadene
David Pearl’s Strucadene bought Frasier House, Leman Street, E1, from Motcomb Estates for £9m in July and followed in up in September by buying 20 BBC regional offices and studios for £40m in a move outside London.
Last year Pearl was in the news when he bought quoted property company minnow Newport in a £27.8m recommended takeover. Clearly Pearl, keen cyclist that he is, is not showing any sign of slowing down even at the age of 58.
He 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, Pearl went into property, managing flats and factories, and never looked back. Structadene. Which made £14.9m profit on £26.1m sales in 2002, is easily worth is £66m net assets. Pearl owns it all and we add £3m for five stakes in smaller companies.
Michael Astor
Sableknight
City financier Michael Astor is a member of the Anglo-American dynasty. He is a cousin of Viscount Astor and is here representing the Astor family as a whole.
Sableknight, the family company, made a 2002 profit of £487,000, while its net assets fell slightly to £65m. Astor, 58, used to be a director of Sableknight and held a stake in trust for the family. With proceeds from his work, and an estate company, we value Astor and the wider family at around £68m.
William Rankin
Hanro Property
William Rankin, 73, is chairman of Hanro, a family-owned property group well known in its native North East. Though Rankin only has a small stake, many of the shares in the Newcastle-based company are held in family trusts. In 2003 Hanro made £4.3m profit on £5.8m sales, a slight increase on 2002.
We value the business on its £61.7m net asset figure, adding another £5m to the Rankin family for past dividends, including a share of a £4m dividend paid out by Hanro in 2003.
Roger Wickens
Store Property Holdings
Roger Wickens is a director of the low-key Store Property Holdings. Incorporated in 1979, Store saw its profits rise to £2.2m on £9.2m sales in the year to March 2003. Its net assets fell slightly from £57m to £56.6m in the same period. The shares in the London-based company are owned by Wickens, 60, and family trusts. We value the family on the asset figure, adding £6m for two other companies, Wickens Estates and Foster Wickens Investments. We also add £4m for past dividends.
Stephen Conway
Galliard Holdings
London residential developer Stephen Conway has a 67.6% stake in Galliard Holdings, which made £14.7m on £171.9m sales in the year to March 2003. It has hefty borrowings and we value the company at about £90m on these figures. That values Conway’s stake at around £61m. But past salaries and stakes in a range of small property companies take Conway, 56, to around £66m.
Jeremy Agace
Hambro Countrywide
Jeremy Agace continues to keep a low profile, having left Britain in the late 1980s for Monte Carlo, where he enjoys racing classic Ferraris. Agace, 64, left after selling estate agency Mann & Co, which he took over from his father. In 1985, it floated on the stock market and a year later merged to form Hambro Countrywide. His proceeds from the merger were £37m. As a tax exile, his wealth will have grown to at least last year’s total of £65m.
Tom Wheatcroft
Wheatcroft Land
Tom Wheatcroft, a Leicestershire builder and Formula One fanatic, revitalised the Castle Donington track after opening his collection of grand prix cars to the public in 1973. Wheatcroft, 82, continues to expand his motor museum, which is regarded as the most complete of its type in the world. We can see healthy growth to £11m in the net assets in his three main companies, Wheatcroft & Son, Turnpike Road Farm and Donington Park Racing. He leased out Donington in 1997 for 25 years to Two Four Sorts in a £40m deal. With the proceeds of this deal, his classic car collection and the business interests thrown in, Wheatcroft is easily worth £65m.
Sir John Mactaggart
Mactaggart Heritable Holdings
Glasgow-based property group Mactaggart Heritable continues to grow in value, with its net assets standing at £54.4m in 2002, when it made £3m profit on £3.9m sales. Chaired by 53-year-old Sir John Mactaggart, whose younger sister is Labour MP for Slough, the company was founded by their great-grandfather. Also called Sir John, he was an active Labour man and while he travelled third class, the family can do rather better today. We add £10m for other wealth, taking the Mactaggarts to £64m.
Albert Perry
Cromwell Holdings
Albert Perry started work as a 16-year-old office boy for a firm of London builders. Within 11 years, he was a director and went on to build a property empire. He chaired the quoted PSIT, which agreed a £247m takeover by the MEPC group in September 1997. Perry, now 80, and his family trusts collected £40m in cash from the deal. We add £18m for the family farming, property and stud company, Cromwell Holdings, with £18.5m of net assets in 2003. There are a further £5.5m of net assets in Stonplan & Cromwell Investments.
Ray Horney
Real Estate Opportunities
Ray Horney started renting washing machines to Brighton council tenants in the 1950s. He later moved into white goods retailing and sold his business for £21m in 1985. Five years later, Horney took a stake in St James Beach Hotels, a West Indies chain floated in 1994 – and three years later he made another £27m on selling it. At 68, he is now chairman of Real Estate Opportunities, where he has a £790,000 stake. He sold £4.6m worth of shares last year and has around £3m of assets in seven other quoted companies.
Danny Desmond
Bride Hall
Danny Desmond started the Bride Hall property group in 1984, and 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. He now owns all of Bride Hall, which continues to develop and trade, selling Northern Ireland’s largest current retail park development, Faustina, in August, with its joint venture partner, for £34m. Bride Hall Group showed £10.5m net assets in 2002, but his property portfolio, a £5m stake in Great Portland and other stakes take Desmond, 64, to £61m easily.
Berish Berger
Greaterhaven
The late Gerson Berger earned his money originally by hauling sacks of dried beans round London, hence his nickname “Getzel the bean man”. But by dint of hard work and living frugally, he built up a huge residential property empire. The family ran into difficulties in the early 1990s property crash but survived and later prospered. The family is now headed by Gerson’s 48-year-old grandson, Berish, a director of more than 100 companies. We can see £70m of net assets in them, but prudently cut that back to £60m.
Peter Levy
Shaftesbury
Peter Levy, 64, has just stepped down as chairman of quoted West End specialist Shaftesbury almost 20 years after he founded the company. Levy’s father was a major player in the field in the 1950s and 1960s through his company Stock Conversion. That was taken over in the early 1980s, valuing the family stake then at £40m. Levy’s stake is now worth over £8.6m. Past share sales (including a £5m sale in early 2004), other assets and the proceeds of the Stock Conversion sale take the family to perhaps £60m.
David Lewis
Marylebone Property Holdings
David Lewis, 65, is a chartered surveyor with at least £30m of stakes in companies including Marylebone Property Holdings, Ledale Investments and Molyneux Securities. Determinedly low profile, he still has an eye for an opportunity, like the scheme for 330,000 sq ft of offices in Euston, NW1, he won consent for last year.
With impeccable timing, he sold several businesses right at the top of the market – including Hampton Trust, which fetched £100m just before the 1987 crash. Lewis got £25m for his 25% stake in Hampton. With other assets we value the family at around £60m.
Anthony Loftus
Accurist Watches
Anthony Loftus, 62, is one of three brothers who run Accurist Watches, the business started by their late father. They also own a large amount of property in the Baker Street area of London. Accurist is worth £15m, based on £237,000 profit on £17.6m sales in 2002/03 when it had £9.3m net assets. Other reports put the family’s wealth at more like £50m. But with the rise in Baker Street prices, a £60m price tag is a conservative valuation.
Albert Hay
Capital & City
Chartered surveyor Albert Hay and his family own around 75% of London property firm Capital & City, which made £1.4m profit in the year to September 2002. It also has more than £40m of net assets on its balance sheet. Since then it has let a development in London’s Davies Street, in Mayfair, to famous Italian restaurant Cipriani, and sold St Lawrence House in Soho to Great Portland Estates. But we value the Hay family stake on its share of the 2002 asset figure – some £30m. With other property investments of around £30m, we say Hay, 57, and his family are worth £60m.
John Dunsdon
Coldunnel
John Dunsdon’s Coldunnel made a £120,000 loss on sales of £7m in the year to March 2003, but the Surrey-based company is easily worth its £31m net asset figure. We add around £26m for 52-year-old Dunsdon’s other assets, including a large home counties estate and £6m of dividends in recent years.
Douglas Woolf
Romulus Holdings
Leicester-based Romulus Holdings is owned by Douglas Woolf and his family trusts. We value Romulus on its £53.9m net assets for 2002/03. We add £2m for other assets and past salaries including £995,000 in 2002/03 paid to Woolf, 67, whom we presume is the highest paid director.
Carl Brian
Headcrown
Carl Brian, 39, a chartered accountant, is a director of Headcrown, a private and very low-profile London property-to-construction company. His father, Edward, retired as chairman in 1995. Headcrown made £6.6m profit on £163.7m sales in the year to September 2003.
While Headcrown is owned by two Channel Isles companies, we reckon the Brian family is the ultimate owner. We value the business at £45m, as profits fell recently. But £14m of dividends from 1998 to 2002 and other assets add £10m to the family after tax.
Jack Brignall
Wykeland Group
Jack Brignall sold his original company, truck distributor Tillotson in the early 1960s. Today Brignall, 77, has construction, property and farming interests in his family-owned Wykeland Group. The Hull-based business had £52.8m of net assets in 2002/03, when it made a £3.6m profit. We value the business on the net asset figure. Other assets will take the Brignall family to at least £55m.
Robin Tomkins
Grainger Trust
Robin Tomkins started as an estate agent in Essex but built up a profitable property business that was taken over by the quoted Grainger Trust for £61m in October 1994. After the takeover he sat on the Grainger board and had a sizeable stake. But Grainger is now run by Rupert Dickinson, son of major shareholder Robert (122) and Tomkins is no longer a director or listed as a major shareholder. Our local sources in Essex report that Tomkins, 78, has handed the bulk of the sale proceeds to his family, which we cannot confirm. But we list the family at £55m to reflect the share sale less tax.
|
|
||
|
No |
Name |
Wealth (£m) |
|
5 |
Sir David & Sir Frederick Barclay |
1,200 |
|
20 |
The Clarke family |
500 |
|
56 |
Jim Mellon |
175 |
|
63 |
Tom Scott |
150 |
|
77 |
Phyllis Somers |
120 |
|
89 |
David Kirch |
100 |
|
89 |
Maurice Wohl |
100 |
|
136 |
Jeremy Agace |
65 |
|
152 |
Mike Bell |
52 |
Mike Bell
Parkridge Holdings
Long-time Jersey resident Mike Bell, 56, has interests in French property and shopping centres in England. A canny investor, his total portfolio is still worth at least £52m. He is on the board of Parkridge Holdings, the fast-growing London-based property group, run by John Cutts (168), and worth £40m after making £5.3m profit on £73.2m sales in 2003. We assume Bell has a 25% stake worth £10m.
Paul Leach
Hubert C Leach
Paul Leach, 76, is chairman of Hubert C Leach, a Hertfordshire building and property firm started by his father, a first world war veteran, in 1933. He started modestly with shops and houses in north London. In the last war, with housebuilding stopped, he turned to building army camps for British and American forces. Paul Leach joined the business in 1949 and the board five years later. The company headquarters is a large 400-year-old house in Buntingford, Hamels Mansion.
Hubert C Leach is prospering today, even though profits fell to £5.8m on £26.9m sales in 2002. It has £36m in net assets and is easily worth £44m. We can also see five other Leach family businesses with £8m of assets. The Leach family takes little out of the businesses and we value it at around £52m.
Stuart Wall
Opal Property Group
Opal Property Group, a low-key Manchester property business, was started in 1998. Its accounts for the 18 months to September 2003 showed an £8.8m loss but the net assets soared from £32m to £51.5m. Industrialist Joe Dwek joined the board in December 2003. Opal is entirely owned by director Stuart Wall, 53, and we value him on the net asset figure. Opal specialises in residential and student accommodation in the North and Midlands.
James Barham
Bayfordbury Holdings
James Barham, 67, is chairman of Bayfordbury Holdings, a Hertfordshire property-to-construction company trading as Rialto Homes. In the year to July 2003 it made £19.6m on sales of £107.9m (up sharply on 2002). Some of this profit was exceptional but we value the business at £60m. Barham has a 75% stake worth £45m. With other assets and £16m of dividends in the past six years, Barham is worth at least £51m after tax.
Brian Death
Wickford Development Company
Wickford Developments is a very profitable developer based in Essex. Run and owned by Brian Death, 69, it made £8.7m profit on £20.6m sales in 2002. Death and his family trusts own the entire operation, which is easily worth £45m. Past salaries take Death to perhaps £51m.
Melvyn & Delia Grodner
Atmore Properties
Melvyn, 60, and Delia Grodner, 51, own some asset-rich property companies in Liverpool. Their principal operation, Atmore Properties, had £34.5m net assets in its June 2003 accounts. But we can see at least another five small but separate businesses with a further £12.5m of net assets. In addition, one of the Grodners will have been the highest paid director at Atmore, netting a £3.7m salary in 2003. With other property and past salaries, the Grodners are easily worth £50m.
Nick Leslau
Prestbury Investment Holdings
Nick Leslau reckons the property market is now “hotter than it was in the 1980s”. He has taken advantage of the huge institutional demand for direct property and in the past few months has raised £550m from sales. The most recent sale — a clutch of buildings for £253m – made a multimillion-pound profit for Prestbury, the property company that Leslau, 45, owns with fellow tycoon Nigel Wray (89).
Trained as a chartered surveyor, Leslau teamed up with financier Wray to build quoted property group Burford. He left Burford in 1997 and started Prestbury. Renamed Prestbury Investment Holdings, it shuns the stock market, and at the end of 2002 had £44m net assets. Leslau has a 51.4% stake, which we value on the net asset figure at £23m. We add the £1.9m net assets of his NML Developments. The profits from the recent sales and other assets will take him comfortably to £50m. He will shoot up this list in the next year or two when the fruits of those deals are apparent in the Prestbury accounts.
Kevin Linfoot
KW Linfoot
Kevin Linfoot began his career as a property developer at 16, buying and selling terraced houses in his native Yorkshire. In 1981, he started KW Linfoot plc, 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. His other assets include a Russian art collection, a chain of filling stations and a leisure portfolio, all of which bring the 46-year-old Linfoot in at a conservative £50m.
Andrew Ruhan
London Park Hotels
Andrew Ruhan, 42, is moving into residential development in a big way. His Bridgehouse Capital has earmarked four of his empty office blocks for conversion into luxury flats. The move follows Ruhan’s first residential venture – a £40m scheme to turn London’s Lancaster Gate Hotel into 138 flats – which was granted planning permission recently.
Ruhan has always been a pioneer in the property field. In 1998, he put all his money into buying the former Financial Times printworks in London’s Docklands. He turned the building into one of Britain’s first telehouses through his company, Global Switch. In early 2000, Elliott Bernerd’s (61) Chelsfield and a Canadian investor paid nearly £88m to take a 66% stake leaving Ruhan with a third of the equity. But he did not walk away with £88m. He had to put most of his cash back into the company to fund expansion.
The collapse of the internet sector hit Global hard and its two backers had to write down their investment sharply. In early 2002, he sold his remaining stake in Global for an undisclosed sum but it was likely to have been around £10m, judging by the valuation at the time. Since then Ruhan has been buying hi-tech businesses in America that have fallen on hard times, as well as expanding his property activity in Britain, as befits the son-in-law of one of the Richardson twins (39).
Having survived a terrible helicopter crash, Ruhan snapped up 37 hotels two years ago in a £688m deal. He paid £155m in cash and took a £531m loan secured on 32 of the hotels. However, as EG reported, a recent Standard & Poors report on the hotels cut the value sharply to between £447m and £524m.
We do not expect this to impact on Ruhan’s own wealth. The conversion of office blocks should make a handsome return. Interestingly, we can also see that the main parent company for his hotels – London Park Hotels – made an exceptional £55m profit in its latest 2002 accounts. It also paid out a £35.9m dividend to its parent company, based in Jersey.
We are not sure whether Ruhan owns the Jersey parent (though he is one of only two directors at London Park). Cautiously we only raise our valuation of him to £50m this year.
Michael Slade
Helical Bar
Michael Slade, 58, is managing director of Helical Bar. A chartered surveyor and keen yachtsman, Slade has an 11%, £28m stake in the London-based operation even after recently exercising options and selling shares on at a £1.3m profit. With low gearing, Helical Bar has ridden out the downturn and is repositioned to start generating development profits again. Slade’s remaining options, stakes in ventures such as Interactive Digital Broadcasting and Europa Property Investments, plus his own property assets, should easily take him to £50m, perhaps a lot more.
Sir Sigmund Sternberg
Starmount (Securities)
Sir Sigmund Sternberg, 83, has a reputation as a great philanthropist and a tireless worker for peace and reconciliation between Jews and Muslims. He is also an active backer of New Labour. His business interests include a family investment company, Starmount Securities, which made £3.6m profit on £4.9m sales in 2002. It has £21.7m of net assets. We can see another £4m of net assets in other small companies. With other interests and with his reputation for charity work, we reckon Sternberg and his family are worth £50m.
Michael Pass
Granwood Holdings
Michael Pass owns Granwood Holdings, a Chesterfield-based property and holding company. Its main subsidiary is the highly profitable National Floorcoverings. Granwood’s profits fell to £5.9m on £40.9m sales in 2002, but the company is being reorganised and its assets totalling over £46m are being distributed to its subsidiaries in the form of a dividend. Pass, 67, owns all the Granwood shares and we value him on that special dividend figure, adding another £3m for other assets.
Richard Harris
Cardinal Group
London-based Cardinal Group is run by chartered surveyor Richard Harris, 59, who has more than 100 directorships including Cardinal Lysander, run with his brother Jonathan. Cardinal is his most significant company, with £37.7m of net assets in 2002/03. His family has a 66% stake, worth over £21m. They also have stakes in nine companies adding another £20m in net asset terms. One of the newest is Praedia Investment, set up with former Keneth Peter’s agent Robert Harris (no relation). We value the Harris family at £48m.
Henry Moser
Jerrold Holdings
Henry Moser, 55, runs Jerrold Holdings, a low-key Manchester property firm. The Mosers own most of the shares in the company, which saw profits soar from £9m to £16m on sales up similarly sharply to £37.9m in the year to June 2003. It has £51.4m of net assets and we value the business on this figure. The family has a £46m stake, but we add £2m for smaller companies such as UK Mortgage Corporation with £520,000 net assets.
Peter Dawson
Consolidated Property Wilmslow
Property developer Peter Dawson owns and runs Consolidated Property Wilmslow, an Alderley Edge developer. Founded in 1986, Consolidated only publishes abbreviated accounts, but it did have £19.9m net assets in its accounts for the year to June 2003.
Dawson, 51, is also a director of the separate Gemsupa, which showed £26.5m net assets in its 2002/03 accounts. It is owned by the Jensal Settlement, but we assume that the Dawson family is the ultimate beneficiary as Dawson is the only director and was the settler and trustee of the Jensal Settlement. In all, we value the Dawson family at £47m.
Edward Lonergan
Deramore Holdings
Edward Lonergan, who comes from Belfast, owns and runs Deramore Holdings, a profitable development and construction company. Incorporated in 1987, Deramore saw its profits fall from £4.9m to £3.9m in the year to March 2003, but has net assets of over £47.6m. Lonergan, 53, also has 50% of Lochinver, a property company with £5.8m of net assets and a £1m stake in Deramore (L) Ltd. We value Lonergan at £46m in all, after tax.
Shami Ahmed
Finance, property and fashion
The City is taking a keen interest in Shami Ahmed’s next move. In the late 1980s and early 1990s it was his outrageous jeans and flair for publicity through his Legendary Joe Bloggs fashion label that brought attention. Now it is as an astute investor that he gets noticed.
He recently sold his stake in quoted menswear operation Moss Bros to fellow fashion entrepreneur Kevin Stanford for around £22m. It was not the usual form of share stake, having been held by Ahmed’s broker via contracts for difference, a form of derivative trading that meant he did not have to put up the cash to buy the shares.
On the fashion front, he has also been linked to Austin Reed, another fashion operation, in which Peter Klimt and Guy Naggar (97) of Dawnay Day are recent investors.
Pinwise, the parent company for Legendary Joe Bloggs, has not produced any full accounts for some years. Of the 22 directorships we have seen for Ahmed, the only other significant one is his quoted Legendary Investments business, through which he invests in quoted companies. His stake there is worth around £1.5m.
The Times valued his Joe Bloggs stake and his distribution rights for some well-known brands at perhaps £7m in total. He has some significant property interests, including Curzon Plaza in Mayfair, an upmarket apartment block that he bought last year for around £20m. We have also been told that he owns property on London’s North Circular Road. In all we settle for his property interests we can see and a little bit on top, taking Ahmed, 42, to £45m.
John Cutts
Parkridge Holdings
Having just finished a project at Brighton’s Marina and sold it to Capital & Regional fund X-Leisure for £65m, Midland property tycoon John Cutts, 45, is planning to upgrade the rest of the site. Cutts made his first fortune in 1998 selling the Kingspark Developments business to US firm ProLogis, netting around £30m for his 33% stake. After that, Cutts set up on his own with Parkridge Holdings, which made £5.3m profit on £73.2m sales in 2003. It is worth £40m, valuing Cutts’ 54% stake at £21.6m. With his earlier proceeds he is worth £45m after tax.
Nick Capstick-Dale
UK Real Estate
After taking his A levels, Nick Capstick-Dale went to work 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. Since then, through his main company, the London-based UK Real Estate he has been assembling an impressive long-term portfolio. Recent additions to this include a big chunk at up-and-coming Kings Cross – the former Almeida Theatre’s temporary home at 10-18 York Way.
UK Real Estate showed around £13.3m assets in its 2001/02 accounts, but we reckon Capstick-Dale, 42, is worth £45m with other companies including Denecroft Estates, UK Real Estate pension fund and Nick Capstick-Dale Properties.
Raymond Mould
Pillar Property
Raymond Mould qualified as a solicitor in 1964 and became a tax specialist, before switching to property and forming the Arlington Group in 1976 with Patrick Vaughan (238). It was sold for £279m in 1989. Mould then started up Pillar, which floated in 1994.
He collected £19m from the sale of his Arlington shares and has a £15.4m stake in Pillar, which he has successfully turned into the leading manager of retail parks in the UK and is now moving into Europe by setting up the €500m Retail Europark fund, focusing on Italy, France and Spain. With earlier share sale proceeds, share options and his extensive racing interests, we reckon Mould, 63, is easily worth £45m.
Paul Smith
TMX Corporation
In 12 years, Paul Smith has built up TMX Spicehaart to be the largest independent estate agency business in Britain. Based in Colchester, Smith has adapted internet and text messaging alerts to revolutionise the fast-growing TMX, with 250 branches nationwide. In 2002, parent company TMX Corporation made £5.25m profit on £80.3m sales. It is easily worth £45m on these figures. Smith, 43, and his family own all the shares, making them among the richest estate agents in the country.
Elizabeth Abbott
Abbott Bros Holdings
Abbott Bros Holdings, a St Albans-based investment company, made a £1.1m profit and had £27.4m of net assets in the year to March 2003. Elizabeth Abbott, 50, is a director and family member representing the family who own all the shares. The company is easily worth its net asset figure. But the family also took a £15m dividend in 2001 and £3m in the previous three years combined, and is now worth £44m.
Anthony Khalastchi
Flodrive Holdings
Well known in London auction rooms bidding for property, Tony Khalastchi made auction history in May 2003 when he bid £8.55m for an industrial ground rent in Bristol — the biggest lot ever to have been sold under the hammer. Khalastchi, 43, can afford it. His family’s two investment vehicles Flodrive and Strandpark Properties made a combined £4.4m profit on £25.5m sales in 2002/03. He also has a joint venture for trading with William Pears Group (8) called Logical Properties which bought a £113m portfolio of shops from a British Land joint venture. We value Flodrive and Strandpark on their sharply higher total net assets of £41.5m, to which we add another £2.5m for other Khalastchi assets, which may be low.
Martin Oestreicher
Moledene
Martin Oestreicher, 76, is a very low-profile property man based in London. His family own at least two-thirds of Moledene, a commercial property operation in Euston. Moledene made £1.6m profit on £2.9m sales in 2002/03. But it has £64.8m net assets and we value the business on this figure. That means the Oestreicher family stake is worth £43m.
James Watts
Corporate Investments
Corporate Investments, an Ipswich-based property group, is owned by 66-year-old James Watts and his family. In the 2001/02 accounts, the company revealed net assets of £27.7m. The Watts family also has a number of other smaller but separate property groups. Property Associates is the largest, with £14.6m net assets in 2002/03. In all, with other, smaller stakes in another five companies, we reckon the Watts family must easily be worth £43m.
Bruce Jarvis
Ravensale
Bruce Jarvis, 56, runs Ravensale, a private property company that owns half of Paddington Basin with Chelsfield. The bulk of the shares are held by a Bahamas trust, but we assume they are owned by the Jarvis family. In 2001/02 Ravensale made £1.8m profit on £10m sales. It has £42m of net assets. We value the family on the net asset figure, but again, they could be a lot higher.
Peter Stephenson
Able UK
Peter Stephenson has been in the news this year over his plans to dismantle four redundant American navy ships at his Hartlepool breakers yard. The plans have been stalled over fears of possible contamination from the ships.
But Stephenson is determined to press on, and told MPs recently that there was “real potential for Teesside to become recognised as the European centre of excellence for ship recycling”. He spoke after giving evidence to a committee of MPs in London examining the potential to expand the ship recycling yard at Graythorp, near Hartlepool, run by his company Able UK. A deal for 80 ships with the US Navy could dwarf the present four ships.
Stephenson is managing director of Able UK, which aside from its demolition work, is also a property development company that redevelops redundant industrial sites. It made a £560,000 profit in 2003, with £38.9m of net assets.
We value the company on the net asset figure, adding another £902,000 for the assets of a separate company – Stephenson Demolition. Stephenson, 57, and his family own all the shares in the businesses. We value the family at £42m with other wealth and property and after tax.
David McLean
David McLean (Holdings)
David McLean kick-started the redevelopment of Princes Dock on Liverpool’s waterfront by building what is now the Crowne Plaza hotel on a speculative basis, at a time when others were refusing to risk investing in the area. Similarly, David McLean Developments and Nikal Investments (see Alan Murphy, 59) are involved in the £300m Masshouse scheme on Birmingham’s Eastside. The 260,000 sq ft first phase at Masshouse — which is in addition to the courts building — will include 140 apartments and 130,000 sq ft of offices and there is already a potential prelet lined up with KPMG.
A former bricklayer who moved into housebuilding in the 1970s, McLean has built his eponymous construction-to-development group into one of the major contractors in the North and Wales. A float has been mooted, but nothing has materialised. In the year to June 2003, its parent company Broomco (1563) made £4.5m profit on sales of £171m. On these figures it is worth £40m.
McLean owns 96%, worth £38m. A £5.6m salary in 2001/02 and other assets should take McLean, 61, to around £41m after tax. But he will go a lot higher when Masshouse is finished.
Frank Boyd
Killultagh Estates
Founded in 1997, Killultagh Estates is one of the leading property companies in Northern Ireland. The Belfast-based operation is owned and run by Frank Boyd, 50, and his family. Boyd started in electrical contracting and later moved into property.
Killultagh Estates had £33m of net assets in its 2002/03 accounts. The separate Killultagh Properties is worth its £6.4m net assets, while an electrical contractor is worth another £1.6m, taking the Boyd family to around £41m in all we reckon.
Philip Davies
Philip J Davies (Holdings)
Philip Davies left the merchant navy in 1945 to join his family clothing business. After five years he branched out on his own. By 1970, he realised that making clothing was not as profitable as property investment, and built a portfolio mainly in the North. His private company Philip J Davies (Holdings) and his private property partnership have assets worth £41m, following a steady year in the Manchester and Leeds commercial property market, with virtually all their sites let. He is a Justice of the Peace in Manchester. We value Davies, 83, on the assets alone.
|
|
|
|
London and South East |
184 |
|
North West |
28 |
|
West Midlands |
21 |
|
Yorkshire |
21 |
|
East Midlands |
16 |
|
Scotland |
11 |
|
Northern Ireland |
10 |
|
East Anglia |
9 |
|
South West |
9 |
|
Wales |
8 |
|
North East |
7 |
|
Channel Isles |
6 |
|
Overseas |
3 |
Jeffrey & Edward Azouz
AR&V Investments
Originally backed by their uncle “Black Jack” Dellal (16), the Azouz brothers are directors of around 70 companies. Last year, Edward joined the board of AIM-listed Pathfinder Properties after his Sunnyview’s failed attempt to take over Pathfinder. Their main vehicle, AR&V Investments, is a property investment group that made £3.4m profit on £12.6m sales in 2002/03. With £21.2m of net assets and with their other properties, the brothers Jeffrey, 57, and Edward, 55, have built up a £40m property fortune – Black Jack would be proud.
Paul Bassi
Bond Wolfe Properties
Earlier this year, Paul Bassi’s company Bond Wolfe cast its eye over Chesterton International, but in the end did not proceed with a bid. It perhaps reflected 42-year-old Bassi’s very cautious approach to the property business. Last year, he had taken advantage of high property prices to sell some sites for around £10m, but he is a long-termist seeking to increase values by his development work.
As one of the Midlands’ new generation of entrepreneurs, Bassi is now one of the biggest private landlords in the Black Country. Through his various Bond Wolfe companies, we can see at least £4m of net assets, but on top of that Bassi has sold his confectionery operation Herbert J Roberts, which achieved £30m sales last year. In all, Bassi is worth £40m.
Robert Bourne
Happybadge Projects
Property entrepreneurs Robert Bourne and his brother Graham built up the Local London property group from a £6m float in 1986 to the point where it was sold for £110m in a takeover in 1989. They had 15% and should have received £16.5m. Since then it has been Robert who has hit the headlines as a Labour donor, bidder for the Millennium Dome and a property tycoon. The brothers built and sold stakes in companies such as Ex-Lands and Clubhaus. Graham Bourne’s son, also called Robert, has inherited the entrepreneurial streak, setting up a serviced office business this year with Henderson.
Robert Bourne, 54, owns Happybadge Projects with £20m of net assets. In all he should easily be worth £40m.
Demi Chervak
High Point Estates
Plans to build a huge soccer academy in the North East have put Demi Chervak in the news of late. He is managing director of Harrogate-based High Point Estates. Founded in 1985, High Point showed £20.5m of net assets in its accounts for the year to July 2003. Chervak, 50, and his family own it all.
We value the business on its net asset figure, adding another £17.6m of assets for another four separate High Point companies. With other assets, the Chervak family should be worth £40m.
Louis Goodman
Union Estates
Profits soared from £2.2m to £4.8m in the year to September 2003 at Union Estates. The Glasgow-based business is owned by Louis Goodman, 53, and his family.
As a young man of 21 he launched his property empire from the back room of a dress shop, while he was working full-time as a company secretary at a steel stockholder. After a period as a public company, Goodman took the business private in 1998. His City Site Properties subsidiary has £36m net assets. In all the Goodman family is worth £40m.
Tom Bloxham
Urban Splash
Tom Bloxham started out selling fire extinguishers door-to-door and later made his fortune as a developer, converting derelict buildings in northern cities – particularly Liverpool and Manchester – into trendy apartments for sale at high margins. One of his biggest – with 1,500 homes – is New Islington at Ancoats, Manchester. In 2002, his Urban Splash made £4.1m profit, and it has a strong asset base. Bloxham has a 70% stake. There are some other Bloxham ventures such as TBI 2000, a property letting business, while he also chairs the BaaBar leisure operation. In all Bloxham, 40, is easily worth £40m.
Caspar MacDonald-Hall
London & Cambridge Properties
Caspar MacDonald-Hall has several property and industrial holdings. He has around 5% of London & Cambridge Properties, with £320m net assets in 2002/03, so his stake is worth around £16m. He also has half of Proudreed, a Southampton property investor, with £34m net assets, so his stake there is worth £17m. We can see over £2.5m of net assets in other small companies. MacDonald-Hall is also a non-exec at AIM, the quoted aviation group, where he has a £3.3m stake. In all, at 53, he is easily a £40m man.
Martin & Louisa Morgan
OTH Ltd
Martin Morgan, 42, and his wife Louisa, 37, founded The Original Travel House in 1992, specialising in last-minute bargain holidays. Morgan left school at 16 with five O levels and started welding. He later became a holiday rep before opening his first shop in his native Swansea. In 1999, he sold the business for around £40m. The proceeds have been invested in property and the family trusts own 88% of OTH Ltd, with over £40m net assets in 2002. Allowing for tax we stick at £40m.
Brian Moss
GAT Investments
Brian Moss runs Gat Investments, a property company based in South Wales. It has “21.2m of net assets in its 2002/03 accounts, when it made £1.4m profit on £2m sales. The business is owned by the Moss family and trusts. Sixty-eight-year-old Moss also founded Nuaire Holdings, a South Wales-based air conditioning manufacturer, which was sold for £38m in March 2004. Family trusts had around half the company. The Moss family is worth around £40m in total.
The Murray family
The Hollins Murray Group
The Hollins Murray Group is a well-respected Cheshire-based property company. With investments in many of the prosperous Cheshire towns south of Manchester, it is run by 50-year-old managing director Andrew Murray. In 2002/03, the group made £2.2m profit on £5m sales. We value the operation on its £35.4m net asset figure. Murray only has a small stake, with the business owned by 20-plus shareholders from the wider Murray family and family trusts. We add another £4.4m for the net assets of Dinmore Manor Estate, taking the Murray family to £40m.
Peter Rich
Rich Investments
Rich Investments specialises in industrial property in London’s Old Kent Road and Crayford in Kent. Peter Rich, 50, is managing director of the company, founded in 1966, which made £1.9m profit on £2.3m in 2002/03. It has £38.3m net assets and is owned by Tanhauser Investments (Bermuda) Ltd. But the accounts also note that Peter Rich’s family trusts own Tanhauser. We value the company at slightly more than the net asset figure, adding £1m to the Rich family for homes and other baubles, taking it to £40m.
Charles & Anne Scrutton
Scrutton Estates
Founded in 1962, Scrutton Estates is a property company based in the East End of London. It is owned and run by Charles, 59, and Anne Scrutton, 56, either directly or through trusts. In the year to April 2003, the business made £1m profit on £1.4m sales. But its net asset figure rose to nearly £38m. Other assets should take the Scruttons to £40m.
Simon & Paul Upward
Ocobase
The Upward brothers Simon, 43, and Paul, 41, run and own Ocobase, a Croydon-based property company. In 2002/03, it made £5.7m profit on £7.1m sales. With £33m net assets and low borrowings, it qualifies as a £36m company easily. We add another £4m for other assets including two more separate property companies, Bayside Investments and Sima Investments, taking the Upwards upwards to £40m.
Sidney Corob
Corob Holdings
Recently awarded an honorary fellowship by University College London, 81-year-old Sidney Corob is regarded as a consummate spotter of property trends. He bought his first property after the war when prices were depressed. He sold in 1979 and again in 1987, at the top of the market. He still has Corob Consolidated, with much lower net assets of £28.4m in 2002. Private assets and other companies such as Sidney Trading and Corob Retail keep the Corob family wealth at £40m easily. He was awarded the CBE in 2002 for charitable work and fostering Jewish-Christian relations.
Brian Howard
CAEC Howard (Holdings)
Brian Howard, 68, chairs CAEC Howard (Holdings) a Bedford property-to-industrial group. Founded in 1935, the company saw its profits leap from £2.4m to £4.2m on £9.2m sales in the 14 months to the end of September 2003. But we value the business on its net assets, which have shot up to £49.6m. The Howard family owns well over half the shares and using the net asset figure, we value the family stake at £39m.
John Nike
Nike Land Securities
Founded by John Nike in 1968, Nike Land Securities has evolved into a broadly-based leisure company with interests including ice rinks and a hotel. Nike built his business by backing popular trends – the ice rink opened at the height of Torville and Dean mania. The John Nike Stadium in Bracknell is home to the Bracknell Bees ice hockey team, though it is known locally as the Beehive. Nike Land went into a £1.2m loss on £70.4m sales in 2002/03. But it still has £35m of net assets. Nike, 69, owns all the business with his family and trusts. We now value the Nike family at £38m.
Jan Fletcher
Fletcher Group Holdings
Forging ahead with plans for City One, a £262m development in Leeds city centre, Jan Fletcher is building a 1.25m sq ft development just seven minutes from Leeds station and one minute from access to the M1 and M621. Some 7,000 people will work there. City One is another side of Fletcher’s burgeoning business empire but it should prove to be her most lucrative.
Initially an accountant, Fletcher took over an ailing trucking operation for £2,000 in 1974. She soon found she could make more money from buying and selling trucks than from haulage, and quickly moved into the motor trade. Buying and selling sites for car dealerships sparked her interest in property and for the past 15 years she has been working on commercial and residential developments throughout Europe. She came to prominence as Veuve Cliquot Businesswoman of the Year in 1994, a tribute to her formidable talent in building up a business portfolio including Bryan’s of Headingly – a fish and chip restaurant in Leeds – and Bee Health, a health product firm that is now the leading manufacturer of propolis in the world, exporting to 18 countries.
Her largest visible business asset is Jan Fletcher Properties, which had £8.8m net assets in 2002. She has a third of MSF Motor Group, which made a £505,000 loss in 2002 on £90.4m sales. It could be worth £10m. Bee Health has around £717,000 net assets and she has half that company. With property developments elsewhere, at 50, Fletcher should be worth £38m (£12m down on last year, when MSF was valued at £20m).
Henry Bandet
Prime Estates
Henry Bandet and his sisters own 74% of Prime Estates, a Hitchin-based property company that made a £1.9m profit on £5.6m sales in 2002. We value the business on its £47.4m net asset figure. That values the Bandet stake at £35m. Bandet, a 41-year-old American, also owns 78% of Hunting Gate Group, another property firm, with £2.2m of net assets. In all we value the Bandet family at £37m.
Mark Kay
ROK Property Solutions
Chartered surveyor Mark Kay is a prominent Exeter developer, who founded the Rockeagle operation in the city. In 2001, he sold the business to local construction firm EBC in a £14.7m deal and the business was renamed ROK Property Solutions. Kay joined the board of the quoted group as property director, and has a £12.6m stake. He also retains Eagle One Investment Holdings with £23.1m of net assets (though he is not on the board) and some other smaller companies. With other assets, at 54 he is a £37m man.
Fred Pritchard
Pritchard Holdings
Fred Pritchard, 51, is a property developer in the Walsall area. With his family, he owns Pritchard Holdings, a property group with £32.5m of net assets in 2003, when it made £1.8m profit on £4.5m sales. We can see over £3.5m of further net assets in several smaller Pritchard companies, taking Pritchard and his family to £36m.
David Gradel
UK Estates
David Gradel’s family was involved in property development in the North in the 1960s. Gradel, who worked for US bank Security Pacific, came into the business in the late 1980s and ran UK Estates, a quoted property operation, where the family had a large stake. The Gradels eventually took UK Estates private after failing to expand it and fighting off a takeover from Ashquay Estates. Now through various trusts the family owns most of the shares. It had £25m of net assets in its 2002/03 accounts. The Gradel family also have a large property portfolio in Glasgow, Leeds and Birmingham. We say Gradel, 55, and his family have to be worth £35m in all.
Carol Ainscow
Artisan Holdings
From her pioneering work co-founding Manto’s, the stylish gay bar on Manchester’s Canal Street, Bolton-born Carol Ainscow has become one of the city’s top property developers, involved in high-profile refurbishment projects such as the Express building. Aside from her main company, Artisan Holdings, 46-year-old Ainscow has stakes in a dozen separate companies. In all we can see around £7.5m of net assets attributable to her in their 2002 accounts. But her total portfolio is now worth around £35m, after revaluation.
Peter Gadsby
Birch
In 2001 Peter Gadsby sold his 77% stake in Birch, the Derby-based property and construction group to Miller Group (35). No price was disclosed, but we reckon that it must have been at least £30m on the back of Birch’s £3.3m profit on £64.6m sales in 1999. Gadsby, 56, remains chairman of Birch’s development division. He still owns a small stake in struggling football club Derby County, and has widened his interests in telecoms and property investment. We add another £5m for these assets.
Sir Geoffrey Leigh
Allied London Properties
Sir Geoffrey Leigh was a major London property dealer via quoted property group Allied London Properties. He is also active in helping a range of charitable causes, and a fervent admirer of Margaret Thatcher. In 2000, ALP was taken over by a consortium backed by Leigh, whose family had a 23.6% stake and he stepped down from the management team. Under the terms of the £138m deal, the Leigh stake was worth around £32.5m. Other assets will take 71-year-old Leigh and his family to perhaps £35m.
Richard Ross
Regentsmead
Richard Ross, 61, chairs Regentsmead, a north London-based property group founded in 1991. He owns 47% directly. We presume his family also owns the rest held in trust. Regentsmead made £2.4m profit on £17m sales in 2002/03 and has £32.7m of net assets. We value the Ross family on the net asset figure. We can also see another £1m of net assets in other Ross companies such as Waygrove Properties. In all we reckon the family is worth £34m.
Nigel Timmis
Abbey Manor Group
Timmis’s training as a structural engineer must help. As managing director of the Yeovil-based property-to-construction group Abbey Manor, he has presided over a surge in profits to £5m on £14.5m turnover in 2002. With a strong balance sheet, the business is easily worth £30m on these figures. It is largely owned by the Timmis family and trusts. We can see another £5m of assets in four other companies, so allowing for tax, we say £34m is about right for 43-year-old Timmis.
Dominic & Tiffany Wainford
The Tilt Estate Co
Dominic Wainford, 36, and his wife Tiffany own and run Wainford Holdings, a south London-based property company. Its main subsidiary, The Tilt Estate Company, had £34.5m net assets in its March 2003 accounts. The company was founded in 1934. We value the Wainfords on that net asset figure, less a little for costs if they should sell.
Charles Clowes
Clowes Developments (UK)
Charles Clowes, 64, is chairman of Clowes Developments, a Derbyshire-based developer. He owns all the shares in the company, which saw its profits fall from £6.6m to £2.7m on £11.7m sales in 2002/03. With a strong balance sheet and nearly £29m of net assets, the company is easily worth £30m on these figures. We add another £3m for Clowes’ other business assets.
Peter Kershaw
PK Investments
Chartered surveyor Peter Kershaw made his name working on big City of London developments as a founding director of Sir Stuart Lipton’s Stanhope Properties (220). After a stint in Malaysia he later started the HQ Global Workplaces serviced office business, which he sold to a US property giant in 1998 for £22.4m – making a further £10m when the business was sold again in 2000.
Kershaw bought back the European operations of HQ for around £20m in May 2003 with the backing of US billionaire financier George Soros. With the serviced office market looking in much better shape now, Kershaw’s timing in buying back the operations was impeccable.
There is little evidence of wealth in his own company, Office Services Management, with £771,000 net assets in its 2002 accounts. As a result we stick with last year’s £33m figure for 51-year-old Kershaw.
Guy Marsden
Safehawk
Trained as an accountant and chartered surveyor, 47-year-old Guy Marsden is well equipped to be one of Britain’s foremost business park developers. He owns half of Highbridge, a London-based operation, with hefty interests in the North East particularly. Its parent Safehawk made £7.5m profit on £101m sales in 2002/03, but adding in part of the directors’ £2.6m emoluments to the bottom line takes the profit to perhaps £9m, and justifies a £60m valuation. That values Marsden’s stake at £30m. Salaries and other assets add £3m.
Piet Pulford
Safehawk
Piet Pulford, 49, is one of Britain’s top business park developers. He owns the other half of London-based Highbridge, along with Guy Marsden. As for Marsden, we value Pulford on Highbridge parent Safehawk’s £60m net worth, plus £3m for past salaries and personal assets.
Harry Neal
St Anselm Development Co
Harry Neal, 72, is managing director of St Anselm Development Co. Started in 1960, it is owned by the Neal family and trusts. The family was in construction and development during and after the war. In the 1980s and early 1990s Morton had a stake in the Savoy Hotel and sat on the board. He was also chairman of the Connaught. London-based St Anselm shows nearly £30m of net assets in its accounts. We value the business on this figure, adding £2.5m for the net assets of several smaller companies also owned by the Neal family.
Richard Cattermole
Ryan Elizabeth Holdings
Richard Cattermole started a hotel in 1971, when he bought a rundown terraced house in Ipswich for £800. He now runs a property-to-hotels and pub group. His main company, Ryan Elizabeth Holdings, made £403,000 profit on £15.4m sales in 2003. We value the firm on its £27.4m net asset figure. Cattermole, 59, and his family own 97%. We can see another £5.5m of net assets in other smaller companies, including Manor Investments (Ipswich) Ltd. We value the family at around £32m.
Malcolm Dagul
Dancastle Associates
Accountant Malcolm Dagul, 51, is a London-based entrepreneur. From the early 1980s he has been dealing in and developing property through his family-controlled company Shop Constructions (Holdings), which had £15.6m of net assets in its 2002/03 accounts. Dagul later ran the quoted Southend Property Holdings, though he left in 1996, selling his stake for £15.2m. We can also see at least another £2m of net assets in smaller property groups. The Dagul family is easily worth £32m.
John Finlan
Morbaine Properties
John Finlan, 79, and his family own Morbaine Properties, a private property group based in Widnes. Started in 1963, Morbaine made a £391,000 loss on sales of £6m in 2002/03. But we value it on its £29.9m of net assets. Most of the shares in Morbaine are held in trust but we assume the Finlan family owns them. Past salaries (£1.5m in 2001/02 for the highest paid director) and other assets take the Finlan family to £32m.
Eric Wright
Eric Wright Group
Eric Wright runs the Eric Wright Group, a Preston property-to-construction business. In recent years he has been involved in some high-profile commercial developments in the North West, including extending the freight terminal at the airport.
Wright, 67, owns just over half of the Eric Wright Group’s parent, Henmead. The rest is owned by a charitable trust. The group is worth perhaps £60m on the back of £5m profit and sales of £105m in 2002. It has £45m of net assets. Other assets add £2m.
Laurence & James Grant
Martin Grant (Holdings)
Laurence, 50, and James Grant, 47, run Martin Grant (Holdings), a Dorking-based property-to-farming group well known in Surrey for its development work. Founded in 1974, the business made a healthy £3m profit on £50.2m sales in 2002. It has £28.9m in net assets and we value the business on that figure. The Grant family owns it all directly or via trusts. In addition we can see several smaller companies with around £1.6m of net assets attributable to them. In all the family should easily be worth £31m.
Martin Higginson
Cityblock
In the 1980s, Lancaster-based Martin Higginson ran a series of magazines including BMX Weekly, which he sold to IPC. He tried his hand again and moved into scratchcards, building another business, which he sold in 1996 to Scottish Telecom. He stayed until 1999, when he decided to start out again on new ventures. His main business is now Monstermob – chaired by former cabinet minister Ken Baker – which specialises in content for mobile phones, some of it raunchy. He has a £9m stake in the AIM-quoted operation.
But he also has a £4m stake in Cityblock, another AIM company, which is developing student accommodation. The company has developed more than 200 flats in Lancaster and is looking for sites in other university towns. It is this stake that gets 41-year-old Higginson into this list, at £31m.
John Chamberlain
Chamberlain Holdings
John Chamberlain, 60, is managing director of Luton-based developer Chamberlain Holdings. The Chamberlain family owns 96% of the shares in the business, incorporated in 1983. We value the family stake at slightly below the £30.7m net asset figure at the end of 2002, adding another £650,000 for the separate Home Counties Investments operation, which brings the Chamberlains to £30m.
Matthew Faherty
Overcourt
Overcourt, a London property company, saw its profits fall from £1.9m to £1.5m on £4.3m sales in 2002/03. Matthew Faherty, 55, is its finance director and a member of the family that owns the business. We value the company on its £20m net assets. The family also owns three other companies, including Hawcroft Court and Merinwell, which add another £10m of net assets. Cautiously we value the Faherty family at £30m.
Manish Chande
Mountgrange Capital
Manish Chande must have felt he had become part of the establishment last September when he was appointed a commissioner of English Heritage. It is a far cry from the early 1970s, when Chande’s family was expelled from Uganda by the Amin regime. He was in school in England at the time.
He trained as a chartered accountant. By the late 1980s he was finance director of the Imry property group, where he teamed up with entrepreneur Martin Myers (111). After the sale of Imry, which netted the pair their first fortune, they went on to launch outsourcing and PFI company Trillium Group. In 2000 Trillium was taken over by LandSec, netting Chande around £8m. He joined the main board and was tipped as a possible boss, but left in 2002 after speculation (which he denied) that he was mounting a bid.
At 48, he is still working with Myers, through their new joint company Mountgrange Capital. He owns 45% of the company, which had £24m net assets in 2002/03. Myers and Chande have not lost their ability to turn a decent profit on a property deal. Mountgrange sold the St Marks Shopping Park in Lincoln for around £90m last year, just 18 months after buying it for £67m. In all we value Chande — with his other stakes (including £1.1m in the quoted Property Fund Management group), profits from earlier deals and that stake in Mountgrange – at around £30m.
Mathias Kraus
Lonia & Pall Mall Investments
Mathias Kraus and his family own Pall Mall Investments, a north London-based property group that made a £993,000 profit in 2001/02, and showed net assets of £13.3m. We value the business on the net asset figure. But Kraus family trusts, we reckon, also own Lonia Ltd, a West End-based property business, which made a £1.4m profit on £2.5m sales in 2001/02. It is easily worth its £16.2m net asset figure. In all, 62-year-old Kraus and his family should be worth £30m.
Martin Landau
Development Securities
Martin Landau, now 67, a chartered accountant by training, became one of the top property developers in the City. His major coup was to join his City Merchant Developers to Imry, led by Martin Myers (111). When Imry was taken over in 1989, Landau made around £10m from the deal. He also had a £2.3m stake in Development Securities, another quoted property group. Since December 2002 he has chaired MAB’s UK arm and this year acquired its first London development site. His deals over the years should give him wealth of comfortably over £30m. But cautiously we stick with £30m for the Monaco-based mogul.
Peter Livesey
PJ Livesey Group
The PJ Livesey Group has developed a reputation for converting old buildings into stunning homes throughout the North. Run by its managing director Peter Livesey, 56, the Manchester-based operation made £3.9m profit on £25.6m sales in the year to June 2003. It is easily worth £30m on these figures. The Livesey family and trusts own all the shares and we value them at £30m.
|
Rich in the North East |
||
|
No |
Name |
Wealth (£m) |
|
122 |
Robert Dickinson |
70 |
|
133 |
William Rankin |
67 |
|
177 |
Peter Stephenson |
42 |
|
220 |
Stuart Monk |
30 |
|
259 |
Nigel Vaulkhard |
22 |
|
314 |
Alan Stewart |
12 |
|
320 |
Geoffrey Walton |
11.6 |
Stuart Monk
Jomast Property & Finance Co
Stuart Monk, 55, is managing director of Jomast Property & Finance, a property company with interests in construction. The Stockton-based operation has been busy developing housing on the hugely successful Hartlepool Marina site in the area of the redundant commercial docks.
Jomast made £1.2m profit on £5.6m sales in 2002/03, but it does have £29.3m of net assets, a sharp rise from the previous year. We value the business on that figure. Monk and his family trusts own all the company. We add another £600,000 for other assets and stakes in separate property companies.
Sir Stuart Lipton
Stanhope
Sir Stuart Lipton founded Stanhope in 1983 and is feted for developing the Broadgate Centre in the City of London. The company is now private, after near bankruptcy in 1994. He has had a difficult year, resigning early as chairman of the government watchdog CABE, but Stanhope is thriving. In the year to March 2003, its profits were £1.3m on £15m sales. With £16m of net assets, it is worth perhaps £25m today. Lipton, 61, has a 75% stake worth £20m. We add another £10m for salaries and £2.7m net assets for First Palace Securities.
Peter Murphy
C&G Properties
C&G Properties, a profitable London property group, made a healthy £555,893 profit on £2.2m sales in 2002/03. The group is 87% owned by managing director Peter Murphy and his family. In addition we can see another 74 Murphy directorships. C&G has £11.9m net assets, while Murphy’s stakes in another three separate property groups, including Knightspur Properties, take his total net assets to around £20m. But with a large London home and other assets we suspect Murphy, 59, is worth at least £30m – possibly considerably more.
Nicholas Porter
Unite Group
Starting as a property developer, 34-year-old Nicholas Porter moved into building new student accommodation through his Unite Group in 1991. It provides students with rooms built on production lines, dropped into the shell of the building as it goes up. Bristol-based Unite floated in 1999 and has grown by acquisition. This year it started the first of a series of student villages – with Lehman Brothers – in Sheffield. Porter has a £28m stake, and with a £2m share sale is worth £30m at the very least.
John Ray
Ashley Group
John Ray, 56, hails from Yarmouth and worked as a ship’s painter. In the mid-1970s he started Rigblast, an engineering and maintenance company serving the North Sea oil industry. Though he sold part of the operation to a £15m management buyout in 1996, he retains important business interests. He owns Ashley Group, a property company that made £806,000 profit on sales of £18.1m in 2002. It is easily worth its £14.5m net assets. We can see another £3m net assets in another company. He is worth around £30m in all.
Colin Tett
UK Land
Chartered accountant Colin Tett steered the then quoted UK Land through the difficult days of the early 1990s property slump when the company had to agree a rescue plan with its banks. By 2002, it was sufficiently robust for Tett to lead a buyout of the business, which delisted from the stock market in a £28.9m deal and sold its main asset, the Elephant & Castle shopping centre. Tett’s family company Neonhall, now controlled by the private UK Land, had £29.7m net assets in its 2001/02 accounts. It is a complex share structure but we value Tett, 58, and his family at £30m.
Lisa Voice
Woolcastle
The former partner of the late Billy Fury (Britain’s answer to Elvis), who died at her north London home in 1983, Lisa Voice is also a music publisher and property magnate. Her main company, Woolcastle, is a property investment operation, which made a £31,000 loss on £1.8m sales in 2002/03. But it does have £29.1m of assets. The business is owned by Voice, 51, and her trusts. We can also see the separate Border Investments, with £236,000 net assets, where she has a 60% stake. In all she is easily worth £30m.
William Hopkins
Hopkins Developments
Hopkins Developments is a highly profitable, if very low-profile, property developer based in Wincanton, Somerset. Started in 1977, it made a healthy £2.1m profit on £10.6m sales in the year to May 2003. It also has a strong balance sheet with low borrowings and £28.6m of net assets. We value the business on its net asset figure. The managing director, 55-year-old William Hopkins, and his family own it all.
John Elkington
Penhurst Properties
Kent developer Penhurst Properties saw its net assets rise sharply to nearly £25m in 2003/04. Over the past 12 months Penhurst has let more than 100 properties (which represent about 50% of its total) to the Notting Hill Housing Association for 10 years providing long-term secure income. The business, founded in 1987, is 95% owned by John Elkington. With around £1m of other assets in smaller property companies and hefty dividends in recent years, Elkington is easily worth £28.5m.
David Dangoor
Monopro
David Dangoor, 55, is managing director of Monopro, a family-run property company based in London. The Dangoor family has at least 73% of the shares. In the year to June 2003, Monopro made £1.8m profit on £2.2m sales. We value the business on its £33.3m net assets. That puts a £24.3m value on the family stake. But a number of other small companies such as Discdale Limited, add perhaps another £3.2m, taking them to £28m.
Peter Luff
Luff Group
Luff Group, a Berkshire-based property developer, is owned by 68-year-old Peter Luff and his family. In the year to June 2003, the company made just £762,000 profit on £7.1m sales but it has £24.7m of net assets. We value the operation on the net asset figure adding another £2.7m for the net assets of Luff Holdings, owned by Luff family trusts. In all we reckon Luff and his family are worth £28m.
Roy Williams
Cardinal Group
Roy Williams, 63, is a director of a number of London-based property companies where he has significant stakes. He lives in the West Midlands, and his stake in Cardinal Group (33%) is worth a third of its £37.7m net assets in 2002/03. Richard Harris (164) owns the remainder. He also has a similar 33% stake in Cardinal Lysander, with £22m of net assets. To this £17.8m we add another £8m for other stakes (£4.8m in Barbridge Limited alone) and property assets, taking Williams to at least £28m.
Patrick Vaughan
Pillar Properties
Patrick Vaughan and his partner Raymond Mould (168) set up Arlington in 1976 and sold it for £279m in 1989 to British Aerospace. They now run quoted property group Pillar, which was floated in 1994. Vaughan, 56, is chief executive, while Mould is chairman. Vaughan collected £9m from the sale of his shares in Arlington. He also has 2m shares in Pillar, worth £12.3m. With options (including a near £1m profit from exercising options in May 2004) and earlier share sale proceeds, Vaughan is easily worth £27m.
Julie Davey
Angel Group
Julie Davey owns Angel Group, a London-based property group that provides accommodation for asylum seekers around Britain. The Angel Group, based in Docklands, was founded in 2000. It made a healthy £2.8m profit on £20.4m sales in 2003. It has £25.2m of net assets and is easily worth that sum. Angel Group is entirely owned by Davey and she also has another £700,000 of net assets in companies such as Angel (London) and Angelic Interiors. In all, Davey, 47, is worth £26m at the very least.
Barrie Clapham
Credential Holdings
A leading developer in Glasgow, 53-year-old Barrie Clapham runs and owns a property company called Credential Holdings. Founded in 1989, Credential made a healthy £685,194 profit on £16.3m sales in 2002/03. But we value the business on its £20.1m net assets. Clapham, who worked with Allied London Properties on developments in Glasgow’s city centre in the 1990s, also has other smaller companies, such as Douglas Shelf Six Ltd and Pursol, with healthy net assets. These help him to a £25m fortune easily.
Harry Handelsman
Manhattan Loft Corporation
Canadian Harry Handelsman came to London in 1983 and is best known for his role in introducing the concept of loft living to wealthy young Londoners. In Clerkenwell, Soho, Shoreditch and West India Quay, Handelsman has developed lofts through his Manhattan Loft Corporation. He lives in one of his own creations – a £4m penthouse flat complete with valuable art. The Manhattan Loft Company has assets of around £17m. Known as a generous benefactor, with his profits from the loft work and his other business assets, he can afford it. Handelsman, 55, is worth £25m and we are still counting.
Greta Fenston
Kyle Stewart
The daughter of an army officer, Greta Fenston was the third wife of property dealer Felix Fenston, who died in 1971 leaving £4m in his will. The family also controlled Kyle Stewart, a leading private contractor. In 1989, Kyle Stewart was sold to a Dutch firm for £50m. Fenston controlled 90% of the shares via family trusts. She still owns four small property companies, including Brook Street Investments and Riverline, with nearly £750,000 net assets. In all we still value Fenston, 69, at £25m, allowing for tax and disbursements to other family members.
Sir Ernest Hall
Dean Clough
Best known for his role in transforming the huge but derelict Dean Clough mill into a stunning example of urban regeneration in Halifax, Sir Ernest Hall, 74, is also a renowned pianist. He made his first fortune in textiles and then in property through the Mountleigh Group. Hall left in 1983 and immediately started redeveloping Dean Clough. He has sunk £20m into the site and it now employs 4,000 people in more than 100 companies. Dean Clough Ltd, Hall’s firm, has £12m of net assets. The Hall family is worth £25m and quite possibly a great deal more.
Michael Heller
London & Associated Investment Trust
Accountant Michael Heller and his father built up and sold KP Nuts to United Biscuits in 1968. Heller invested his wealth in at least three different companies, including quoted property firm London & Associated, where he is chairman. His family’s stake is now worth £15.4m. His other quoted stakes add £1.5m, while we can see at least another £5m of stakes in a range of small property and allied companies. With homes and other assets added, Heller, 68, and his family, including son John who is chief executive of London & Associated, must easily be worth £25m.
Terry Johnsey
Johnsey Estates
Johnsey Estates, lead by its chairman Terry Johnsey, is based in Newport, South Wales. The company owns Newport Retail Park and the Leeway industrial estate, as well as the Mamhilad Park development near Abergavenny, Gwent. Johnsey Estates is owned by trusts, which we assume are controlled ultimately by the Johnsey family. Johnsey Estates (1990) Ltd, its main subsidiary, has £19.5m net assets. Seventy-three-year-old Johnsey, the father of former showjump stars Debbie and Clare, is a keen racehorse owner with 15 horses and four brood mares. We value the family at around £25m with other assets.
Robert Jolly
Limes Developments
Limes Developments, a profitable Lincoln-based developer started in 1986, is owned by 67-year-old Robert Jolly and his family. In 2003 it made £1.4m profit on £2.3m sales and is easily worth its £18.7m net asset figure.
We add another £6.3m to the Jolly family for the net assets of the separate Limes Estates. Limes Developments is particularly good at developing sites for supermarkets and the like in the East Midlands. The two companies’ total net asset figures value the Jolly family at around £25m.
|
|
||
|
No |
Name |
Wealth (£m) |
|
32 |
David Wilson |
380 |
|
36 |
Freddie Linnett |
330 |
|
89 |
Charles Yeates |
100 |
|
122 |
Mel Morris |
70 |
|
136 |
Tom Wheatcroft |
65 |
|
148 |
Douglas Woolf |
56 |
|
163 |
Michael Pass |
49 |
|
202 |
Peter Gadsby |
35 |
|
209 |
Charles Clowes |
33 |
|
240 |
Robert Jolly |
25 |
Paul Locke
Hambro Countrywide
Paul Locke was a director and major shareholder in Mann & Co, the estate agency that merged to form Hambro Countrywide in 1986. He left in 1988 and now chairs Woking recruitment company, Personnel Selection Associates. His 28% stake is worth perhaps £3m, to add to his £25m proceeds from the Hambro Countrywide sale. Other assets easily take him to £30m (£25m after tax) at 64. Which is just as well, as he is a leading figure in the bloodstock industry.
Jonathan Maud
Rushbond
Leeds developer Rushbond has led the way in the revival of the city centre, with projects such as the £100m Brewery Wharf, which includes residential, restaurants, offices and a hotel. Founded in 1986 by managing director Jonathan Maud, 44, Rushbond specialises in converting listed buildings. Maud owns all of the fast-growing operation. Rushbond saw its profits more than double to £3.5m on £11.8m sales in 2003, when its net assets also rose sharply to £18m. We value it and Maud at around £25m on these figures. He shows a great interest in the arts.
Roger Wingate
Chesterfield Properties
Roger Wingate’s father founded London property company Chesterfield, and Wingate junior chaired the business until its £139m takeover by Quintain Estates in 1999. The Wingate family’s stake, held in trust was worth around £16m. But Wingate also emerged from the deal with Chesterfield’s cinemas and television production assets. In all, with his own property assets, we reckon Wingate, 63, and his family are worth perhaps £25m.
Bill Davies
Walton Group
Best known as the man who wanted to buy Aintree Racecourse and build houses on the site, so killing off the Grand National, Bill Davies was thwarted in that bid by the racing establishment and racing sponsor Martell, the brandy group. His Liverpool property business has had a difficult time. In the period to September 2003, the Walton Group saw its net assets drop £2m to £24.5m with losses of £1.3m. Davies, 69, has been planning a £160m development for Liverpool’s waterfront and is working with John Milligan’s Retail Resorts on the Met Quarter. We value him on the net assets.
Neville Andrew
Hargreaves Property Holdings
Hargreaves Property Holdings is a thriving commercial developer based in Littlehampton, West Sussex. Founded in 1967, Hargreaves Property made a good £3.5m profit on £18.1m sales in 2002, while its net assets rose to £23.9m.
The group is largely owned by the Jersey-based Ricotte Trust. But the majority of the directors are members of the Andrew family – headed by 63-year-old managing director Neville Andrew. Several of them also have small stakes in their own name. We reckon the Andrews are the ultimate beneficiaries and value them at £24m.
Henry Cohen
Emco Estates Holdings
Henry Cohen, 43, is a director of fast-growing Leeds firm Emco Estates. In the year to March 2003, Emco made an astonishing £3.58m profit on £3m sales. With net assets shooting up to £23.8m, Emco is easily worth £24m on this performance. Cohen and his family trusts own the company and we value the family on the net asset figure alone. Emco is busy in Leeds with redevelopment work, which has helped boost the asset figure.
Neil Morgan
Morgan Industrial Properties
Electronics engineer Neil Morgan, 46, and his brothers own and run Morgan Industrial Properties, a Derbyshire-based property group that made £2.8m profit on £2.8m sales in 2002. It has £18.8m of net assets and we value the business at around £19m on these figures. Other businesses include Pektron plc, an electronics group founded in 1964, which is easily worth £5m on the back of £21m sales in 2002. Pektron is owned by the Morgans and it takes their value to £24m.
Stephen Raguz
The Impney Group
Impney, a Birmingham-based property-to-hotels group, is owned by Stephen Raguz and his family trusts. Although Raguz was in the news in the early 1980s buying up hotels – including a French chateau, in Droitwich – the group has kept a very low profile in recent years. In the year to March 2003, Impney made a promising £1.3m profit on £4.2m sales. It has a strong balance sheet and £24m of assets. We value the business on the net asset figure. It is owned by Raguz, 65, and his family trusts, and we value the family accordingly.
John Kennedy
Kenmore Investments
European expansion is the name of John Kennedy’s game. In June his Kenmore Property Group bought a £60m portfolio in France from Apollo Real Estate Investment Fund. The move follows hard on Kenmore’s expansion into the Scandinavian market.
But then Kennedy has always been a good traveller. As a graduate, while working his passage on a ship from Singapore to Australia, the vessel rolled in a storm and sank. Kennedy was rescued and landed in Australia in the clothes he stood up in, losing – among other things – his bagpipes.
After building a marina business in the West Indies, he returned to Scotland to start Kenmore. He and his family trusts own it all. We value the profitable operation on its £22m net assets in 2003. Other assets take Kennedy, 53, to £23m, perhaps a lot more.
David Gibbons
Gibbons (Holdings)
David Gibbons, 53, owns a highly profitable property company, Gibbons (Holdings) based in Peterborough. In the year to September 2002, it made £4.9m profit and had £21.1m net assets. It is easily worth the asset figure. In addition, Gibbons also owns the separate Plowright Farms, a cereal producer, with £1.4m of assets in 2002/03. In all Gibbons is easily worth £23m, even allowing for a small holding in Gibbons (Holdings) by his charitable trust.
Andrew Grant
Badnell Properties
Andrew Grant, 46, and his family own Maidenhead-based Badnell Properties, which made a £535,271 profit in the year to March 2003. It has £9.4m of net assets. There are two more Grant companies with £2.5m of net assets between them. Grant’s late father Raymond, who owned all the shares in Badnell until his death in July 2001, left £23.2m in his will (published in May 2003), which included his stake in Badnell. His estate went to relatives and we still value the Grant family at around £23m after tax.
Robert & Julia Hunt-Grubbe
Resurgam Holdings
Resurgam Holdings, a Reading-based property-to-timber group, was founded in 1971. With a very strong balance sheet and £22.1m of net assets, we value the business on that figure. It is owned by its two directors, Robert, 66, and Julia Hunt-Grubbe, and their trusts. As an engineer, Robert made his fortune designing parts for oil drilling equipment. With other wealth, including a dilapidated mansion in the south of France – formerly the regional Gestapo HQ – we value the family at £23m.
James & Stuart Glyn
Milverton Group
Milverton Group, a London-based property investor, is owned and run by Glyn brothers James, 55, and Stuart, 53. In 2002/03 it made a healthy £2.9m profit on £2.8m sales. But we value the business and the Glyns slightly above the Milverton net assets of £21.8m.
George Kean
Fairacres Group
George Kean, 79, is a director of the Fairacres Group, an Essex-based property business with extensive interests in Dorset, including the Bournemouth-to-Swanage ferry. The family also held a stake in the AIM-quoted Tom Hoskins pub group until its takeover in 2001. Fairacres made £1.2m profit on £2.6m sales in 2002/03, and is easily worth its £21.7m net assets. We value the Kean family slightly above the net asset figure.
Nigel Vaulkhard
42nd Street Realty
Nigel Vaulkhard, 57, is a leading property and entertainment tycoon in Newcastle. He owns 90% of 42nd Street Realty, a local property group, which made £1m profit on £1.78m sales in 2002/03. In addition he has comparable stakes in other businesses, such as Lionkirk and Blackie Boy Ltd. In all, his share of the net assets of these companies comes in at around £22m. When not running his business, Vaulkhard is a keen racer of sports cars and sustained a serious crash driving a Porsche 911 in 2003, though he emerged unscathed.
Nicholas Vetch
Big Yellow Group
Nicholas Vetch was joint chief executive of Edge Properties, the quoted retail warehouse company sold for £142m to Grantchester in 1998. He is a chartered surveyor by training and made around £5.7m for his stake. He then co-founded – with Philip Burks (265) – self-storage firm Big Yellow, which came to the stock market in 2000. Vetch, as chairman of the operation based in Bagshot, Surrey, has a £15.7m stake. In all, at 43, he must be worth £22m with other assets.
Jeffrey Smith
Proudreed
Jeff Smith, 59, chairs AIM, a quoted engineering company that makes cabins, seats and security doors for aircraft and trains. The Southampton-based operation is having a tough time, with a profit warning issued in March, but Smith retains a £3.4m stake.
Smith’s main wealth is in a property company, Proudreed, which he owns jointly with fellow director Caspar MacDonald-Hall (182). It made £5.1m profit on £8.7m sales in 2002 and has nearly £34m of net assets, valuing Smith’s stake at perhaps £17m.
He owned the great racehorse Persian Punch, which won over £1m in prize money before his untimely death earlier this year on a racecourse. But with at least 30 horses in training, an estate near Winchester and, our spies tell us, considerable wealth elsewhere, he is easily worth £21m and possibly three times that amount.
Lord Foster
Foster Holdings
A former council worker who did a stint in national service, 69-year-old Foster is now one of Britain’s leading architects. He founded his own firm in 1967 and designs high-quality buildings around the world, including Hong Kong’s new airport. In the past few years he has been much in demand from UK developers. His iconic Swiss Re tower opened in the City of London this year.
Foster has a 91% stake (including trusts) in Foster Group (International). It made £1.7m profit on £37m sales in 2002/03. Its subsidiary Foster & Partners has £20.4m net assets and that is an appropriate valuation. That values Foster’s stake at £18.5m. Other assets add £2.5m.
John Beedle
JHB Properties
John Beedle made his first fortune as an investor in Peter Beckwith’s (53) Riverside plc, a chain of tennis and health clubs. In 1997 it was sold to First Leisure for £61m. The business had been owned by four shareholders including Beedle, and his proceeds should have been around £15m. He invested some of the proceeds in his London property business, JHB Properties, with net assets of £8.1m in 2002. With other assets and allowing for duplication, Beedle, 58, must be worth £20m easily.
Oliver Burge
Padmanor Investments
In 1988, Oliver Burge took over the 2,000-acre Marchmont Estate in Berwickshire. Burge, 63, is not a traditional farmer and is often in London at the Padmanor Investments property group. In 2002, it made £529,000 on £3.8m sales. We value it on its £16m net assets. Jersey trusts own it, but as these same trusts own the Marchmont estate, we assume they are his. Other assets add £4m.
Philip Burks
Big Yellow Group
Philip Burks, 46, was joint chief executive of Edge Properties before its £142m sale to Grantchester. Burks made around £5.7m for his stake. His next venture, Big Yellow Group, offers a self-storage service. The quoted operation is based in Bagshot, Surrey, and Burks – as property director and co-founder, with Nicholas Vetch (259) – has a £14m stake. Share sales in early 2004 add £1.5m. In all Burks should easily be worth £20m, allowing for tax.
Christopher Carvill
Carvill Group
Carvill Group and Vico Properties are two Belfast-based property companies, which made between them £5.5m profit on £33.5m sales in 2003. The Carvill family, led by 42-year-old Christopher Carvill, has stakes in both. But there is some overlapping of interests and other shareholders. Cautiously we value the businesses, which have £22.2m of net assets between them, at around £30m. The Carvill family stake in both is worth together £20m.
Joseph Dwek
IPG Holdings
IPG Holdings is a west London-based property group run by Joseph Dwek, 54, a veteran property man who used to be on the board of the then quoted Newport Holdings. IPG made a healthy £822,000 profit on £5.9m sales in the year to July 2003. But it has £19m of net assets and we value the operation on that figure. Dwek and his family own all the shares in the business and we value the family at £20m with other assets.
|
|
||
|
No |
Name |
Wealth (£m) |
|
85 |
Martin Birrane |
105 |
|
100 |
Thomas Jennings |
94 |
|
119 |
Michael Herbert |
72 |
|
167 |
Edward Lonergan |
46 |
|
179 |
Frank Boyd |
41 |
|
220 |
Matthew Faherty |
30 |
|
265 |
Christopher Carvill |
20 |
|
286 |
Crispin Kelly |
17 |
|
305 |
Patrick Hegarty |
14.5 |
|
311 |
Peter & John Robinson |
13 |
David & Karen Gladman
Gladman Developments
After working at the Michelin tyre plant in Stoke, David Gladman went into property development and now runs Gladman Developments, which specialises in industrial premises such as warehousing and business parks, largely in the North West. Gladman, 48, and his wife Karen, also a director, own around half of Gladman, which made a healthy £9.6m profit in 2002/03. With some solid assets, the company is easily worth £40m on these figures. That puts a £20m value on the Gladman family stake.
Tim & Henry Gwyn-Jones
Gort Property Investments
Tim Gwyn-Jones, 66, and his son Henry, 40, specialise in buying up and then breaking up large country estates, such as the late Lord Camrose’s Hackwood estate. We can see around £20m of net assets in companies they own, such as London-based Gort Securities, Microhire Investments and a stake in another smaller company called Globebourne. Henry bought a small Gloucestershire estate, Foxhill, for a little over £1m five years ago, before putting it back on the market earlier this year (with some additional land) at an asking price in “excess of £3m”. Doing that type of business indicates to us that our £20m valuation for the duo is conservative, to say the least.
Graham Mellstrom
Glen House Estates
Surrey property tycoon and farmer Graham Mellstrom, 73, stood as a UK Independence Party candidate in the 2001 general election. He has had a colourful career, including running the National Guardian Mortgage Corporation, which failed in 1992. He then sought to build a country house on Exmoor, where he had assembled a 3,000-acre holding, and in 1997 failed in a bid to take over the Scottish island of Eigg. His family owns Glen House Estates, a property group with £19.4m net assets in 2002/03. He is a £20m man at least.
Richard Peskin
Great Portland Estates
Richard Peskin, a protege of the late Basil Samuel, is now non-executive chairman of the quoted Great Portland Estates, which Samuel built. He joined the business in 1967 and from 1986 to 2000 was chairman and managing director, before moving to the non-executive role in 2000. His stake is worth around £7.3m. But other assets such as Metropolitan Veneer (with £360,000 net assets), plus his £1m in annual salary and dividends and £6.5m in share sales in 2003 and 2004, take Peskin, 60, to £20m.
Trevor Osborne
Trevor Osborne Property Group
Trevor Osborne, 61, was one of the high-flying property developers of the 1980s, but in 1993 his company Speyhawk went into receivership. He is now engaged in property work through the Trevor Osborne Property Group, with £12.9m net assets in 2002. His family owns the lot. According to reports, the sale of a business in 1996 netted Osborne some £7m before tax for brokering the deal. Other assets take him to around £20m.
John Saville
J Saville Gordon
John Saville started up in property with just £100 of capital after completing his national service in 1952. He built up the J Saville Gordon operation into a leading Midlands property-to-industrial group and retired in 1999, retaining a stake worth around £14m when the business was taken over in 2002 by Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley has put the £570m company – renamed Industrious after the buyout – up for sale and a deal is expected before the end of the year. Other interests, including the £1m assets in Avon Capital, take the 72-year-old Saville to £20m at least.
Charles Skene
Skene Investments (Aberdeen)
After leaving public school Loretto at 16, Charles Skene worked in his family’s photography operation, Studio Morgan. He expanded the company and then sold it. He moved into property when Aberdeen’s oil industry took off in the 1970s. Today the family owns Skene Investments (Aberdeen), which made £253,000 on £2.9m sales in 2002/03. It has £17.3m net assets. The separate Skene Enterprises is worth £2m. Skene, 69, and his family are worth £20m.
Yousef Tishbi
Realty Estates
Architect Yousef Tishbi, 56, runs and owns Manchester-based Realty Estates, founded in 1984. It made £1m profit on £5m sales in the year to September 2003, when it had £18.1m of net assets. We value the company on its assets, adding £1.7m for the assets of the separate Leeds Properties Ltd. In all, the low-profile Tishbi is easily worth £20m.
Harold Pasha
Joint London Holdings
Harold Pasha is a low-key London developer who owns Joint London Holdings, with £12.4m net assets in its accounts for the year to June 2002, when it made a £286,000 loss on £557,000 sales. But its subsidiary, Joint London Properties, made a £441,000 profit on £1.3m turnover in the same period. It has £18.95m net assets and we value Pasha, 57, slightly above this figure.
William Record
3T Bros
Fresh from Southampton University, William Record started his own business in 1989. Braebourne Spring supplied cooled water to offices and by the late 1990s, when Record sold, it was making profits of over £1m on £7m sales. At 37, Record is now involved in 3T Bros, a parent company with hefty property and telecom interests. He is the largest shareholder in the group, owned by his family. In 2002/03, it made £655,000 profit and had net assets of £18.7m. In all, the Records are worth £19m at least.
George Akins
SJC 14
The Akins family, led by 75-year-old George, has interests in property, bookmaking and amusement services. Their three main Nottingham-based companies, SJC 13, SJC 14 and SJC 15, have net assets totalling nearly £18m. We value the Akins family at that level.
Eric Hobbs
E Hobbs (Farms)
Eric Hobbs, 69, runs a property-to-farming company based at Earls Colne Airfield near Colchester. He also owns a business park, leisure centre and golf complex there. In the news in April over plans for a new J Sainsbury food store in the centre of Halstead, Hobbs is in detailed discussions with the supermarket giant to develop a 15,000 sq ft superstore. E Hobbs (Farms), owned by Hobbs and his family, made £786,000 profit on £2m sales. But with £16m net assets it is worth around £18m.
Charles Lousada
Lousada
Charles Lousada founded property company Lousada plc, in 1969, and was in the news in the early 1990s when he took over the Invest In Britain campaign. Projects such as the redevelopment of an old Kidderminster carpet factory have also been in the news more recently (in 2003). Lousada made a very healthy £501,000 profit on £1.1m sales in the year to September 2003, but we value it on its £17.7m net assets. It is owned by the Lousada family. Other assets, including a stake in Telford Property, add £320,000 to Lousada, 66.
Richard Mintz
Anglo Scottish Properties
Anglo Scottish Properties is a low-profile developer with substantial interests in Aberdeen and a restaurant investment in Soho. It is also developing in North London near its Camden headquarters. It is run by managing director Richard Mintz, 58, and showed a healthy £1.5m profit on £3.2m sales in 2002/03. We value the business on its £16.8m net assets. Mintz and his immediate family have 12% but a trust has 88%. We assume it is part of the Mintz family. Assets such as Louis J Mintz add £1.2m.
Lincoln Small
Salaft Properties
Salaft Properties, a Slough-based property group, was started in 1975. It is owned by Lincoln Small, 60, and his family. Salaft made a hefty £863,000 loss in 2002/03. But it does have £17.9m net assets. We value the business on that net asset figure. The Small family is easily worth £18m with other assets.
|
|
|
|
Capricorn |
39 |
|
Taurus |
37 |
|
Gemini |
34 |
|
Cancer |
33 |
|
Libra |
29 |
|
Aries |
26 |
|
Leo |
26 |
|
Scorpio |
23 |
|
Pisces |
22 |
|
Virgo |
22 |
|
Sagittarius |
21 |
|
Aquarius |
21 |
Adrian Wyatt
Quintain Estates & Development
Trained as a surveyor, Adrian Wyatt co-founded high-flying property group Quintain Estates & Development in 1992, and floated the company on the stock market four years later. Quintain is heavily involved in two prestige London developments: the Dome and Wembley. Both are going well. In June, the commercial contracts and planning agreements were signed at the Dome. And Wembley also won planning consent that month. Wyatt, 56, who drives a burgundy Aston Martin and is having a replica world war one biplane built, has an £11.4m stake in Quintain. But options, past salaries and dividends take him to £18m
Charles Mitchell
Mitchell Properties
Charles Mitchell runs Mitchell Properties, a Hampshire-based company that invests in areas such as tenanted houses. Founded in 1988, Mitchell Properties only produces abbreviated accounts, but in 2002/03 showed £17.7m of net assets. We value the business and the wider Mitchell family, which owns all the shares, on that figure. Fifty-one-year-old Charles Mitchell is here representing the wider family.
Crispin Kelly
Baylight Properties
A former president of the Architects Association, Irishman Crispin Kelly runs and owns Baylight Properties, started in 1982. He has a reputation for innovation in restoring old buildings and many of his schemes are nominated for design awards. The Fulham-based operation turned in £149,000 profit on £2.6m sales in 2002. But it does have £14.5m of assets, and we value the business on that figure. The Kelly family also owns most of Nelsonville, a separate property group with over £3m of net assets. In all Kelly, 47, and family should easily be worth £17m.
Toni Eyles
West End & Metropolitan
The Wig & Pen, a favoured watering hole of journalists and lawyers in Fleet Street, closed in November 2003 after 95 years. It had been bought by West End & Metropolitan, a Buckinghamshire-based property group that rejected all appeals for it to remain open. The low-key West End & Metropolitan is 69% owned by 61-year-old director Toni Eyles. In 2002/03 the group made £520,800 profit on £1.9m sales. With £23m net assets, Eyles’ stake is worth £16m. She has a further £400,000 stake in Opperman Investments.
|
|
||
|
No |
Name |
Wealth (£m) |
|
4 |
Hon Mary Czernin |
1,300 |
|
34 |
Charlotte Townshend |
370 |
|
36 |
Freddie Linnett |
330 |
|
77 |
Phyllis Somers |
120 |
|
83 |
Susan Prescott |
110 |
|
112 |
Judith Wilson |
75 |
|
157 |
Delia Grodner |
50 |
|
173 |
Elizabeth Abbott |
44 |
|
182 |
Louisa Morgan |
40 |
|
182 |
Anne Scrutton |
40 |
|
197 |
Jan Fletcher |
38 |
|
202 |
Carol Ainscow |
35 |
|
206 |
Tiffany Wainford |
34 |
|
220 |
Lisa Voice |
30 |
|
239 |
Julie Davey |
26 |
|
240 |
Greta Fenston |
25 |
|
255 |
Julia Hunt-Grubbe |
23 |
|
288 |
Toni Eyles |
16.4 |
|
289 |
Sue Morris & Jill Brand |
16 |
|
307 |
Antonia Richard |
14 |
|
326 |
Julie Hester |
11 |
Sue Morris & Jill Brand
Willoughby (35)
Sisters Sue Morris, 49, and Jill Brand, 51, own Willoughby (35) Ltd, a property company that is the parent for Nottingham operation Pickering Investments. It was started by their father, Gordon Pickering, but the shares are now held by his daughters and trusts. In 2002/03, Willoughby (35) showed £16m net assets in its accounts. We value the sisters and company on that figure.
Roger Moss
Grosvenor Securities
London property investor Grosvenor Securities has £10.3m of net assets in its modified 2002/03 accounts. Roger Moss, 54, is managing director of the family-owned company. Though his direct stake is only 12%, family trusts and members own the rest. The Moss family also had a 66% stake in Gatwick-based car park operator BCP Ltd, which had £9m of assets in its 2002 accounts. It was taken over in May 2003 by Dutch group Q-Park. We assume the Moss family received around £6m for its stake and value it in all at £16m.
Gavin Russell
R&R Investments
R&R Investments, a Glasgow-based developer, was founded in 1989. It is owned by director Gavin Russell, 46, and his family. R&R made £1.1m profit on £1.4m sales in 2002/03, and is easily worth its £9.6m net assets. Russell also owns R&R Construction (Scotland), a separate building company worth at least £6m on the back of £660,000 profit on £7.5m sales in 2002/03. In all, the Russell family must be worth £16m, probably a lot more.
Stephen Spouge
Swayfields
Starting his working life as an apprentice mechanic in Grimsby, Stephen Spouge, 50, went into business in the 1960s renting a lock-up garage. He later bought his first petrol station and built up the chain of Stephen Spouge service stations, which he sold to Esso in 1984. He retired a millionaire at 30 but in 1992, with legislation to introduce more competition into motorway services, started up again with a chain of service stations. His family owns the parent company Swayfields, with £15.5m net assets.
Paul Cooke
Ransome’s Dock
Surveyor Paul Cooke set up Ransome’s Dock in the 1980s to develop land around the eponymous dock in Battersea. Based in south-west London, the firm also has a sizeable stake in Australian listed company Anglo Pacific Resources. In 2002/03, Ransome’s Dock – which is landlord to the brilliant restaurant of the same name – only produced abbreviated accounts, showing £15.8m of net assets. The business is 72% owned by 57-year-old Cooke directly, with the rest in what we assume to be his family trusts. We value him on the net asset figure.
Ken Morton
Landmark Development Projects
Ken Morton, 62, is a Leeds-based property man and car park operator. He has three main businesses, including a stake in Keylandmark, which made £624,000 profit in the year to March 2003. His stake there is worth perhaps £2m. In addition Castle House Investments – which he owns with his family – is worth its £10m net assets in 2002/03, while his Yorparks car park operation is worth its £3.5m net assets in the same period. The latter two only show modified accounts.
David Abrahams
Abrahams Consolidated
Property investor David Abrahams, 61, and his family own Abrahams Consolidated, a long-established St Albans property group. Known in the past for building cinemas and owning theatres, Abrahams made a £412,000 profit on £1m sales in 2002/03. But it has £15m of net assets, and we value the company and the Abrahams family on that figure.
Tony & Brian Bird
Bird Group
The Bird Group is active in Stratford-upon-Avon developing offices and leisure facilities. It is owned by the Bird family, led by joint managing directors and brothers Tony, 68, and Brian, 66. In the year to October 2002, it made a £352,000 loss on £6m sales. But it does have £13.6m net assets. We can also see another £800,000 of net assets in other Bird companies. With other wealth, the Bird brothers should be worth £15m.
Martin Barber
Capital & Regional
Martin Barber is chief executive of Capital & Regional, the quoted company turned fund manager which runs the Mall and Junction retail partnerships. Its X-Leisure subsidiary manages Xscape family leisure facilities featuring dining, entertainment and games. Barber’s stake is now worth £12.7m, with the shares trading at record highs. Past share sales take Barber, 60, to £15m at least.
Melvyn Cooper
Mountcharm
Melvyn Cooper, 63, and his family own and run Mountcharm, a Barnet-based property investment company. In 2002, Mountcharm made a healthy £2m profit and is easily worth its £15m net asset figure. We value the Cooper family on this figure.
Michael McCarthy
Rightacres Property Company
Cardiff-based developer Rightacres is owned and run by its managing director, Michael McCarthy, 62. Founded in 1969, Rightacres had £12.3m net assets in the year to August 2002. It is worth this figure. With other business interests, McCarthy is easily worth £15m. Its latest development is an office block in Cardiff – St William House – which will be named, like many of McCarthy’s sites, after a relative.
James Quarmby
St James Securities Holdings
James Quarmby, 59, is managing director of Leeds-based St James Securities. With his family and trusts, he has over a third of the equity in the property company, which reported £2.1m profit on £29.7m sales in the year to September 2002, when it had £15.8m net assets. It is worth £20m, valuing Quarmby’s stake at £7m.
Prominent in the Leeds development “mafia”, St James has a £100m joint venture development called Bridgewater Place – featuring Yorkshire’s tallest building – with two other developers in this list, Landmark (294) and KW Linfoot (157). Another joint venture, with Sterling Capitol, has just unveiled plans for a 3m sq ft business park at Goole. We add £6.1m for the net assets of Quarmby Holdings and another £2m for other stakes, taking Quarmby to around £15m.
Paul Whight
Grantchester Holdings
Paul Whight was chairman and a major shareholder in Grantchester Holdings, the quoted property firm taken over by Hammerson in a 250p-per-share deal in September 2002. The bid trumped a management buyout offer and Whight, now 53, walked away with around £12.5m for his stake. Other assets and property take him to £15m.
Peter Skoulding
Snowmountain Enterprises
Peter Skoulding, 73, is managing director of Snowmountain Enterprises, a March-based property group largely owned by his family. In the year to April 2003, it made £1.6m profit on £6.8m sales. We value the operation on its £15m net asset figure. The wider Skoulding family is easily worth this sum.
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|
No |
Name |
Wealth (£m) |
|
12 |
Albert Gubay |
650 |
|
18 |
David Sullivan |
550 |
|
49 |
Stanley & Peter Thomas |
209 |
|
179 |
David McLean |
41 |
|
182 |
Martin & Louisa Morgan |
40 |
|
182 |
Brian Moss |
40 |
|
240 |
Terry Johnsey |
25 |
|
295 |
Michael McCarthy |
15 |
Nigel Wiggins
Langbourn Properties
Ex-Kleinwort Benson fund manager Nigel Wiggins became managing director of the then Kleinwort subsidiary Langbourn Property Investment Services in 1989. Exactly 10 years later he stepped down as MD of fund SLC Langbourn to run his own private property group. Also called Langbourn Properties, the City-based operation made £587,000 profit on £3.8m sales in the year to June 2003. We value Langbourn on its £16.39m net assets. Wiggins, 54, has a 90% stake worth £14.75m. Other assets such as Farm Street Investments take him to £15m.
Martin Smith
Sibson Mill Properties
Martin Smith made his fortune in property as the boss of the Sibson Mill Properties operation based in Tamworth, Staffordshire. Though no longer on the board, at 54, he retains a 76% stake and with his family trusts, owns all the company best known for its Centurion Court development in Tamworth. In 2002/03, Sibson Mill made £163,000 profit on £1.2m sales. We value the operation and the Smith family on its £14.9m net asset figure.
Patrick Hegarty
WG Mitchell (Derry)
The Hegarty family, led by Patrick Hegarty, 43, owns developer WG Mitchell (Derry). It only produces modified accounts but had £12.7m of net assets listed for the year to May 2002. We value the Hegarty family on this figure, adding £1.7m for the separate WG Mitchell (Scotland) Ltd.
Michael Rosenfeld
Capite Holdings
Property investment company Capite Holdings, based in London’s Hatton Gardens, was started in 1988. It made £1m profit on £1.1m sales in 2002/03. But it has £14.3m net assets and we value it on that figure. It is owned by director Michael Rosenfeld, 47, his family and family trusts. His stakes in other smaller ventures such as Arenski Fine Art, a Notting Hill antique dealer, should take the Rosenfeld family to £14.5m.
Antonia Richard
Kalmax Holdings
Though no longer on the board of Kent-based Kalmax Holdings, Antonia Richard, 60, remains the largest individual shareholder and her family owns 99% of the shares. The company, which specialises in buying retail property – mainly in the South East – was founded in 1955. Its profits hit £1m on £1.3m sales in 2002/03, and it has £14.1m of net assets. We value the business on the net assets, and the Richard family stake at £14m.
George Woodhead
Woodhead Investments & Development Services
Woodhead Investments & Development Services is a Wakefield-based property group started in 1965. It is run by managing director George Woodhead, 65, and owned by him and his family. In the year to July 2003, the company made £735,000 profit on £761,000 sales. It is easily worth its £13m net asset figure. Other assets such as the separate Wakefield Property Company (with £700,000 net assets in the same period) take the Woodhead family to £14m easily.
Anthony Copping Joyce
London & Western Holdings
Anthony Copping Joyce, 65, is a director of London & Western Holdings, a London-based property group started in 1947. He has a 71% stake in the business, which made £776,000 profit on £1.4m sales in 2002/03. But the company also has £18m of net assets, and we value it on that figure. That puts a £12.85m price on his stake. Other assets such as Copjoy Developments (100% his), with £454,000 net assets, take him to around £13.5m, we reckon.
Jonathan Joseph
Pugh Davies & Co
Jonathan Joseph chairs Pugh Davies, a long-established Manchester property group. In the year to April 2003 it showed just £1.6m net assets, but its subsidiary, Davies Pugh Properties, had £13.5m of net assets. The parent company is largely owned by Joseph family trusts, with 57-year-old Joseph himself having a small stake. We value the family on the £13.5m net asset figure in the subsidiary accounts.
Peter and John Robinson
CCS (NI)
Lurgan-based CCS (NI) is owned and run by the Robinson family. It is led by Peter, 43, and John, 40. While it does not publish profit and loss figures, CCS (NI) it has £12.7m of net assets in its accounts in the year to June 2002. We value the Robinson family at around £13m.
John Shepherd
Whiteburn Holdings
John Shepherd runs Whiteburn Holdings, a Wiltshire-based property operation. Founded in 1985, Whiteburn actually does a lot of its work in Scotland, and it made a healthy £628,000 profit on £889,000 sales in 2002/03. We value the business on its £12.5m net asset figure. It is owned by the Shepherd family and although John Shepherd, 47, is the largest shareholder, the shares are widely held through the family and trusts. He is here representing the Shepherd family as a whole.
John Slater
Quorum Estates
In 1985 John Slater resigned from the partnership of Wrather and Co, in Manchester, and formed Quorum Estates, specialising in industrial and commercial development. His family and trusts own all the business, which showed £11.5m of net assets in the year to September 2003. In addition he has a 50% stake in Quorum Developments, a separate company with £1.5m net assets in the same period. In all Slater, 57, and family are worth £12.5m with other assets.
Michael & Sidney Chontow
Cherchon Holdings
Cherchon Holdings is a very low-key property group based in east London, run and owned by an equally low-key family led by Michael, 59, and Sidney Chontow, 60. They are joint managing directors, and we assume them to be brothers. The company made a £171,000 loss in 2002 but has £10.2m of net assets. We can see another £1.8m of net assets in other Chontow-owned companies, including Dasim Developments and Four Seas Investment Co, which will take the Chontow family to at least £12m we reckon.
Nicholas Hewson
Grantchester Holdings
Nicholas Hewson, a former Arthur Andersen accountant, was chief executive of Grantchester Holdings, the retail warehouse developer he founded with Paul Whight (295) in 1989, and floated in 1996. He made around £9m from its 2002 takeover by Hammerson, which valued his stake at £10.5m.
Since the Hammerson takeover, Hewson has set up again, forming LxB with former Grantchester directors Tim Walton and Nick Alford. With past salaries and dividends, Hewson, 46, is worth £12m after tax.
Robert Nadler
Compco Holdings
Robert Nadler, 50, is the son of Marcel Nadler, founder of London property firm Compco. Until June 2003, he was chief executive of Compco. But the business was sold for £147m to a Bank of Scotland-backed company, City & General Securities. Nadler received £9.1m for his stake, but past share sales, other assets and the like should take him to £12m easily.
David Coffer
St James Capital
With a career spanning more than 35 years in the property and leisure sectors, David Coffer, 56, is now heavily involved in the Earls Court exhibition centre. His investment operation St James Capital teamed up with Nomura International to buy the centre in May for £245m. Coffer has a 48% stake in the business, which – though it lost £1.7m on £17.5m sales in 2002/03 – still has £20.2m of net assets. Coffer’s stake is worth £9.7m, but dividends and his stake in the separate David Coffer Lyons add £2.3m. Some say this is a big undervaluation, but we await proof.
Stuart Sapcote
Sapcote Group
Stuart Sapcote, 61, runs the Sapcote Group, a Birmingham-based developer and contractor. The company has specialised in turning old school buildings into smart residential properties, particularly in London. It has also moved into commercial work, with the conversion of an old BBC complex in Chiswick into a media village. In 2002/03, Sapcote Group made £1.1m profit on £5.6m sales. With £14.7m net assets, it is worth £15m, valuing Sapcote’s stake at £10m. Other assets take him to £12m.
Alan Stewart
Essel Securities
Alan Stewart, 51, chairs Glasgow-based property investment operation Essel Securities. Founded in 1970, Essel is a prominent investor in retail and business park sites in major Scottish towns and cities. In the year to the end of July 2003, it made £1m profit on £1.7m sales. Naturally we value the business on its £12m net asset figure. Stewart has a 75% stake, but his family and trusts own the rest of the shares. With this in mind, we value the Stewart family on the net asset figure.
David & Janice Blackburn
Blackburn Associates
London-based property consultancy David Blackburn Associates was started in 1986. In 2002/03, it made £253,500 profit on £472,500 sales, and it has ££11.6m of net assets. We value the operation on its net asset figure. The business is owned by 66-year-old David Blackburn and his wife Janice (a writer and freelance curator) who are both big supporters of modern art. We value the pair on the £11.6m net asset figure.
Steven Thomas
Lacre
Lacre once made vans in Long Acre, WC2, hence its name. Today it is a Hertfordshire-based property operation, run and owned by the Thomas family. Director Steven Thomas is the largest individual shareholder in the group, which made £909,000 on £2m sales in 2003. It is easily worth its £11.1m net assets. There is also Hat Trading, a £480,000 packaging firm. In all Thomas, 53, is an £11.6m man, but quite possibly a lot more.
Geoffrey Walton
Tyne Region North
Geoffrey Walton, 48, runs and owns a Newcastle property group called Tyne Region North. Started in 1993, it only publishes abbreviated accounts, but these showed £11.6m net assets in the year to March 2003. We value Walton on this figure.
Alfred Champniss
Panstar Group
Panstar, based in Uxbridge, is owned by the Champniss family. In 2002/03, it showed a £679,000 profit on £988,000 sales. But we value the low-key property group on its £11.5m net assets. Alfred Champniss, 71, a director and the largest individual shareholder, is here representing the family as a whole and we value them at £11.5m, at the net asset figure.
Graham & Stephen Swatton
Swattons (Andover)
Andover-based Swattons, started in 1960, only produces abbreviated accounts, showing £11.3m net assets in 2002/03. The property business is run by brothers Graham, 48, and Stephen, 45, and largely owned by their family trusts. The company has an aviation subsidiary called Swatton Aviation. We value the family at around £11.5m.
Michael & Robert Jerram
Jerram Falkus
Jerram Falkus, a London-based property to construction group, is best known recently for its work in taking on restoration of Hackney’s Empire Theatre when the original contractor went bust. But it is also heavily involved in development work. In the year to July 2003, it made £1m profit on £22.8m sales. It is easily worth its £11.4m net assets. Jerram Falkus is owned by joint managing directors Michael, 65, and Robert Jerram, 62. We value them on that net asset figure.
Stephen Clark
The Churchmanor Estates Co
In 1985, Stephen Clark left Hillier Parker to run the Churchmanor Estates Co, based in Ipswich. It was not long before he became involved in developing Ipswich and since then Churchmanor has done notable schemes in Cambridge and Huntingdon. Clark owns all of Churchmanor Estates, which made a £110,000 profit on £3.75m sales in 2002/03. But it has a healthy £10.8m of net assets. We value the company on that figure, and with property and past salaries, Clark, 48, should be worth £11m.
Julie & Gary Hester
PSG Franchising
Former policewoman Julie Hester started doing property searches for a friend and soon had established a thriving business, Property Search Group, doing searches for solicitors in Huddersfield. That was in 1997 and soon her husband Gary left his job in insurance to join the business. Now a franchise operation with 97 franchisees, PSG Franchising was sold to London & Boston Investments for £11m in a mix of cash and shares in June 2004. Accounting for previous salaries, dividends and tax we value Julie, 42, and Gary, 40, at the sale figure.
Shabir Randeree
DCD London & Mutual
Shabir Randeree is a director of DCD London & Mutual, a London-based company whose operations range from property to car rental and software. Founded in 1994, it made £499,000 profit on £5.2m sales in 2002. We value the company on its £7m net asset figure. The Randeree family has 10% and most of the rest is owned by a Jersey company. We assume that the Randerees are the ultimate owner of this stake. Another £3.5m of net assets are attributable to Randeree, 42, in businesses such as the Brondersbury Park Hotel. In all we value the Randerees at £11m.
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|
||
|
No |
Name |
Wealth (£m) |
|
34 |
Charlotte Townshend |
370 |
|
37 |
Harry Hyams |
315 |
|
52 |
Jack Baylis |
194 |
|
108 |
John McCarthy |
80 |
|
199 |
Mark Kay |
37 |
|
206 |
Nigel Timmis |
34 |
|
220 |
Nicholas Porter |
30 |
|
312 |
John Shepherd |
12.5 |
|
330 |
John Stanborough |
10 |
Lance Trevellyan
Trevellyan Developments
Lance Trevellyan, formerly head of asset and liability management at Midland Bank and a director of Samuel Montagu, was group director of finance at Gerald Ronson’s (47) Heron Corporation in the late 1980s. He now runs Trevellyan Developments, based in Surrey. In 2002/03, it showed a healthy £158,000 profit on £704,000 sales. But we value the business on its £10.8m net assets. Trevellyan’s other assets should take him, at 50, to £11m easily.
Keith Barnett
Barnett Trading & Development Co
In the mid-1970s Keith Barnett, 61, opened his first shop in London’s King’s Road selling antique beds. Now making reproduction beds, his clients include Madonna, the Beckhams and Tom Cruise. His main company, Barnett Trading & Development Co, is also involved in commercial development. In 2002 it made £274,000 profit on £6.6m sales, but it has £10.1m net assets and a strong balance sheet. Barnett, who owns it all, is easily worth £10m.
David Brand
Grovemere Holdings
David Brand, 51, is managing director of Grovemere Holdings, an Ely-based property-to-warehouse group. Best known for its Lancaster Way Business Park, Grovemere made a healthy £1m profit on £2.8m sales in 2002/03. With £10m net assets it is easily worth that figure. Brand and his family trusts own all the company and we value the family at £10m.
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|
||
|
No |
Name |
Wealth (£m) |
|
69 |
Paul Thwaites |
135 |
|
74 |
Bill Gredley |
125 |
|
112 |
Ardeshir Naghshineh |
75 |
|
149 |
Robin Tomkins |
55 |
|
214 |
Richard Cattermole |
32 |
|
255 |
David Gibbons |
23 |
|
295 |
Peter Skoulding |
15 |
|
326 |
Stephen Clark |
11 |
|
330 |
David Brand |
10 |
John Stanborough
Stanborough (Developments)
John Stanborough is a leading property developer in upmarket holiday-cum-retirement town Poole, Dorset. Stanborough has made its name working on projects such as converting an old grain silo in the town. It is entirely owned by its chairman, John Stanborough, who founded the operation in 1960. The results for 2002/03 show a small £76,000 loss, but the company does have £10.1m worth of net assets. We value Stanborough, 68, on the net asset figure.
Ian Wingrove
Wingrove Properties
Ian Wingrove, 57, is managing director of Wingrove Properties, a Staines, Middlesex-based property-to-pubs group. Founded in 1964, the pubs trade under the Galleon Taverns banner. The Wingrove family owns at least 80% of the shares in the group which made £611,153 profit on £345,000 sales in 2002, the latest accounts. We value the business on its £11.55m net asset figure. The family stake is worth around £10m.
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1. Valuations for quoted property companies are usually based on their share price as at mid-July 2004. For private companies we have largely based valuations on their latest net asset figure. Where private companies have produced strong and sustained profits, we have used that as an alternative valuation model, and multiplied the profit by less than 10 to arrive at a company valuation. |
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2. 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. |
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3. We have counted family trusts as part of family shareholdings in making our assessments of company ownerships. |
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4. It is a common complaint in the property sector that the City does not value quoted property companies fully. But we have not taken that into account when valuing private property groups on their net asset figures for two reasons. First, it is generally assumed 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 property companies also have large assets elsewhere that we do not know about. As a crude measure, we reckon these assets (from their bank accounts to smaller private companies, and other property assets) should outweigh the discount put on the net asset figure by the City on quoted property companies. As such we feel safe to stick with a net asset valuation for most of the private property groups. |
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5. Only those who have made all or a significant part of their fortunes in property investment, trading or related areas, such as estate agency, qualify for this list. Where construction magnates have a significant property element, we have included or excluded them on a case-by-case basis. Where retail tycoons such as Philip Green of Bhs have used property trades to help them on their way to fortunes, we have not included them. But where people such as Tom Hunter (who made his money in retailing) have moved a large part of their fortune into property, we have included them. The Queen is not included as she does not have full control of the Crown Estate in the normal meaning of the word. Most landowners are also excluded, unless (like the Duke of Westminster) their wealth derives from urban property holdings. 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 will adjust valuations next year for any who feel that we have been too wide of the mark. |
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Dr Philip Beresford and Dominic Prince |
