Gerald Ronson & Family
Heron
When Gerald Ronson sold the Quay development in Glasgow in November 2005 for £61.5m, it was the last part of a property portfolio that Ronson had bought in 2002 for £107m. He had been gradually selling it piece by piece, making an £80m profit along the way.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Ronson built up his Heron property empire and a £600m fortune. Then he became embroiled in the 1986 Guinness scandal and served six months of a 12-month sentence after being convicted of secret sharebuying agreements in Guinness’s £2.8bn bid for the Distillers drinks company. Heron nearly went bankrupt, a victim of the early 1990s’ property downturn. But Ronson, 67, has rebuilt the operation, with the support of some wealthy backers.
He has also been trying to clear his name. Late in 2002, the Court of Appeal rejected his appeal to have his conviction quashed, but the European Court of Human Rights ruled he had been robbed of his right to silence in the 1990 trial.
The price of saving Heron was to reduce his stake to 5%, though he has increased it again to around 23% now.
Heron has around £1bn in assets, which will grow sharply in value when its 794ft Heron Tower is built in the City. It will cost £350m to build, with another £200m to be spent on second-phase developments. After seven years’ work, it will be worth £800m.
Right now, Ronson’s stake in Heron should be worth around £200m. Outside Heron, Ronson has the Snax 24 petrol retailing business, which has £40m in cash and made £3.6m on £187.9m sales in 2005. It is worth at least £80m. In all, we value Ronson at £280m.
Robert Adair
Terrace Hill
Terrace Hill, the Glasgow-based property services group, is preparing to place its £300m residential portfolio into a property fund suitable for conversion to a REIT. The AIM-listed investor and developer plans to use the former Nationwide At.Home portfolio it acquired in March 2006 for £272m as seed assets for a REIT-able property fund. The fund will also comprise 331 separate residential properties owned by Terrace Hill before it acquired the Nationwide portfolio.
The portfolio was bought in a joint venture with a syndicate of private family trusts headed by chairman Robert Adair, 49. It comprises 2,253 houses and flats let on assured shorthold tenancies across the UK. At the end of April 2006, its total group assets were £197.9m compared with £173.4m at October 2005.
Adair’s stake in Terrace Hill has risen to nearly £75m in value.
Adair is also chairman of Melrose Resources, the oil and gas exploration group based in Edinburgh. It recently spent £143m acquiring Merlon Petroleum, a big player in the Nile Delta in northern Egypt. His stake in Melrose is now worth £195m.
He has small stakes in two other quoted companies, Plexus and Chameleon Trust, together worth around £5m. Other assets take him to £278m.
Elliott Bernerd
Chelsfield Partners
Despite selling the Chelsfield property operation he founded, Elliott Bernerd is still involved in property deals and researching the market in India. Through newly created Chelsfield Partners, he is also looking for large development projects, working with Sir Stuart Lipton, his former business partner.
When Bernerd took Chelsfield private in May 2004, he pocketed £45m from selling part of his stake. He reinvested the rest, around £56m, in the company. Five months later, Bernerd sold the business, which he began in 1986, turning his £56m into £82m.
Bernerd, 61, also has the separate Chelsfield Investments International, which is involved in large projects in Italy and Gibraltar. In December 2005, he also took a one-third stake in a £400m European property fund and also acquired a minority stake in 47 cinemas in Poland.
These projects could be worth over £500m but, right now, we add just £150m to Bernerd’s £127m Chelsfield proceeds, taking him to £277m.
Stanley & Peter Thomas
Atlantic Property Developments
A bronze statue celebrating the life of David Lloyd George is to be unveiled late in 2006 opposite the Houses of Parliament. This will happen because Stanley Thomas, 65, donated £200,000 towards the £323,000 cost of honouring the wartime prime minister.
But the cost will not hit the Thomas coffers too much. There was a near £106m payout for the Thomas family late in 2004 when their quoted TBI Group, owner of Luton airport, was taken over by Spanish infrastructure company Abertis for £551m.
On top of the TBI sale, the family has commercial property investments which have been doing very well. These include a 300-acre golf development outside Cardiff. A Spanish development, in which Stanley’s brother Peter, 63, had a 40% stake, was sold in 2005 for £75m.
But the family money comes originally from the much more mundane world of pies. The Thomas brothers built up a large snack and pie business, Peter’s Savoury Products, which they sold to GrandMet in 1988 for £75m.
Another £29m in other Thomas ventures, such as Atlantic Property Developments, take the family to perhaps £275m after their sizable charitable donations.
James Mansfield
Truck & Machinery Sales
A workaholic, James Mansfield, 67, says: “The satisfaction I get out of working night and day is unbelievable.” It has also made the Dublin property tycoon very rich.
He left school in his native Ireland at 14 to work in a quarry. But it has been the soaring value of 164 acres on the outskirts of Dublin that has built his fortune. He bought the land after auctioning 1,100 heavy machines used to rebuild infrastructure on the Falkland Islands following the 1982 invasion by Argentina. The property has since been turned into the CityWest conference, hotel and golf centre.
He has another leisure site at Johnstown. Together, they are worth around £264m.
Mansfield has other land and retains his original business, Truck & Machinery Sales, worth around £3m, which is run by three of his sons. In all, he is worth £267m.
Henry Moser & Family
Blemain
Blemain has been described as one of Manchester’s best-kept secrets. Founded by Henry Moser over 30 years ago, it specialises in secured lending to both residential and commercial customers.
Moser, 57, left school at 16 and worked on market stalls as a market trader before starting Blemain. Known for his hard work and dedication to the business, Moser refused to take a business lunch for 20 years as he felt guilty about not being hard at work.
It has paid off. Parent company Jerrold Holdings saw its profits surge to £37.3m on sales of £76.3m in the year to June 2005.
Moser is reported to be looking to sell a stake in the company which would value it at up to £350m. But, cautious until we see the sale go through, we value it at £300m for now. The Moser family owns at least 86%, worth £261m.
Laurence Kirschel
Consolidated Developments
With property prices in Soho and its surrounding areas of central London rising to record heights, Laurence Kirschel, 44, is on a roll.
Tin Pan Alley, one of the last undeveloped sites in central London, is set to be transformed into a new cultural quarter. Kirschel has assembled the site and it is “under starter’s orders”.
Kirschel, who in 1983 set up Consolidated Developments with just £5,000 capital, is also developing a new Soho serviced apartment venture, Sohome, and he promises that another 500,000 sq ft site on New Oxford Street will have something special done to it.
We can see around £52m of net assets in Consolidated Developments’ 2003 accounts and another, smaller, Consolidated operation, all owned by Kirschel. These asset values do not take account of Kirschel’s holdings in Soho, which in terms of square footage are even greater than those of Paul Raymond. Other assets include some choice Mayfair acreage. Cautiously, we value him at £260m until the Tin Pan Alley development is under way.
William Ainscough & Family
Wain Group
Proving he has an eye for a bargain, Bill Ainscough, 58, snapped up 200 acres of land for £20m late last year to add to his property portfolio. But everything Ainscough touches seems to turn to gold.
In 1973, he founded the Wainhomes housebuilding business. 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 property developer with £80.9m of net assets in the year to June 2005.
And his housing ambitions have not ended. Ainscough bought the old Wainhomes’ south-western operation, and the renamed Wain Group made a £24.6m profit on £76.5m sales in 2004-05, and is worth at least £150m. Allowing for tax, Ainscough must be worth £258m.
Peter Klimt & Family
Dawnay Day
The Indian hotel sector is now interesting Dawnay Day, the London-based property to finance group. It plans to invest $200m in 30 hotels. Dawnay Day is run by Peter Klimt and Guy Naggar.
In 1989, Klimt, 60, a solicitor by trade, formed a joint venture with Naggar’s Dawnay Day and joined the board in 1992. Dawnay Day is now valued at more than £500m − conservatively, according to an analysis by The Times late last year.
Certainly, Naggar and Klimt have some hefty visible assets, with 343 directorships between them. We can see around £191m of net assets in a clutch of companies — Sologlade, Dawnay Day Properties, Wordrapid and Starlight Investments. Following The Times’ thorough analysis, we reckon that Klimt and Naggar are now worth at least £250m apiece.
Jonathon Lyons & Family
JE London Properties
Originally from Leeds, Isidore (Jack) Lyons sold his first retail business in the early 1950s for about £3m; with his brother, Bernard, he then built up the UDS stores group, which they sold to Hanson in the early 1980s, netting several million.
The Lyons family, now led by Jack’s son Jonathon, 55, owns large property holdings in the Notting Hill and Kensington areas of London, held in part through JE London Properties. Most of these freeholds were purchased years ago for very little and are now worth at least £2m a piece. The family also has extensive property assets in the US, including shopping centres.
The family also has extensive art. Jack Lyons sold a Monet Waterlilies at a Christie’s auction in Manhattan for nearly £15m. They own many other superb paintings, including works by Degas and Canaletto.
The family companies include the venture capitalist Albion Group and the Sir Jack Lyons Charitable Trust, through which the family has become the principal benefactor to the London Symphony Orchestra.
The family has property in Miami, Switzerland and London. But there is not much sign of asset wealth in JE London Properties or Jlc (London), which had over £1m of net assets between them in 2003-04 (£553,000 net assets), or any of the half-dozen directorships held by Jonathon. We say a £250m valuation is still conservative.
Guy Naggar
Dawnay Day
In late 2005, Dawnay Day created an offshoot, Treveria, which was listed on London’s AIM, valued at £277m, with the aim of investing in German shops and shopping centres. It is the latest coup for London-based French banker Guy Naggar, 66.
He created banks in France and Switzerland before becoming deputy chairman of Charterhouse Bank in London.
In 1981, he bought the Dawnay Day bank, a shell operation, from Lord Rothschild. With partner Peter Klimt, he has built it into a private property and financial services empire, which is now valued conservatively at over £500m. Dawnay Day Treveria is but a part of the operation, which is now also expanding rapidly into India.
Certainly, Naggar and Klimt have some hefty visible assets, with 343 directorships between them. We can see around £191m of net assets in a clutch of companies — Sologlade, Dawnay Day Properties, Wordrapid and Starlight Investments — where Nagger and Klimt are the main shareholders. Cautiously, following a thorough analysis by The Times, we believe that Naggar and Klimt are each worth at least £250m.
The Marquess of Salisbury
Gascoyne Holdings
It is, of course, ownership of the family seat at Hatfield that still puts the Marquess of Salisbury into this list. Completed in 1612, it is a treasure trove of hugely valuable paintings. The art is easily worth £125m, but we cut that in half to allow for any tax demands in any future sales. Hatfield also has a 3,000-acre park and woodland, and a further vast acreage of farmland.
In addition, there is Cranborne Manor, the Dorset family estate from where pig-breeder Salisbury sells his sausages.
But it isn’t just the family homes that make Salisbury a property millionaire. Shrewdly, the 60-year-old Marquess 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, US land, the two stately homes and the art collection make Salisbury easily worth £250m.
Sten Mortstedt & Family
CLS Holdings
Sten Mortstedt’s CLS Holdings made an £80m profit in June 2006 when it sold six properties on a Stockholm business park for £267m.
The property group, controlled by 66-year-old Sten Mortstedt and his family, has a one-third interest in the London Bridge Tower, which will be Europe’s tallest building. A preletting agreement has been signed with luxury hotel group Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts for close to 18,500m2 (199,132 sq ft) of space over 18 floors in the 70-storey mixed-use development.
Aside from this, CLS has been active in selling surplus properties in France and Sweden, while buying others in Germany. As a result, the share price of CLS has risen to an all-time high.
Mortstedt, a Swedish national, has been on the board as chairman since 1994. The Mortstedt family’s 50.1% stake is now worth around £218m. Mortstedt also has a £7m stake in Amino Technology, an AIM-quoted software operation. Share sales of over £36m (including £6m in June 2006) and other assets take the family to perhaps £245m after tax.
David Mabey & Family
Mabey Holdings
Under the Philippine president’s Bridge Programme, Mabey & Johnson built 299 bridges there in 2005. Mabey & Johnson supplies around 1,000 modular bridges a year to countries as far afield as Eritrea and Papua New Guinea, and it is supplying the British Army with replacements for its ageing Bailey bridges in a 15-year deal.
The company is the best-known subsidiary of Mabey Holdings, a Reading firm with 13 subsidiaries that specialise in plant hire, steel fabrication, property and construction-related operations.
David Mabey, 45, chairs the family-owned operation which, in the year to September 2004, saw its profits fall from £48.1m to £29.6m on sales down at nearly £143m.
With a strong balance sheet, and £176m net assets, the company should be worth £200m on these figures. Dividends that have totalled over £45m in the past eight years, and the separate Mabey Securities with £22.5m net assets, take the Mabey family to £242m after tax.
Sean Mulryan
Ballymore Properties
In 1982, Sean Mulryan, a trained stone mason and draughtsman, decided to sell his family home in Tallaght and move into rented accommodation, using the capital to start his business. With the backing of his wife, he bought a site in Ballymore Eustace and began building houses.
His Dublin-based business, Ballymore Properties, is now one of Europe’s largest urban regeneration companies. It has secured contracts worth more than £2bn to redevelop the Wood Wharf site in London’s Docklands and another £200m deal to develop a site in Luton.
Mulryan, who owns the business outright, is also busy working on projects in eastern Europe and Co Dublin, with £15bn of developments all told.
He is now planning to move further abroad. “We’ve been looking at Poland, Asia and America,” he told EG recently. “New York in particular. We’ve been looking there for the past two years, waiting for the right time.”
He is also developing the 2.5m sq ft Eurovea development on the banks of the Danube in Bratislava.
In 2003-04, Ballymore showed £12.6m profit on £141.6m sales. With a strong balance sheet and £87.4m net assets, it is easily worth £227m. Mulryan, 52, has at least £7m of other assets, including a Kildare stud and significant bloodstock interests.
Gerard O’Hare
Parker Green International
A plan to turn a former 22-acre site for Waterford Crystal into a new £205m business development including a multiplex cinema, offices, retail units and an “iconic” building has been unveiled by Gerard O’Hare. The first phase is under way. But it is in the north of Ireland that property tycoon O’Hare has made his fortune.
In 1997, O’Hare left his family building firm in his native Newry, Northern Ireland, to work on his own property developments. A chartered surveyor by trade, he had previously worked on leading projects in Northern Ireland through the 1990s, including Belfast’s Waterfront.
His Parker Green International company is behind some of the North’s most important retail developments.
He owns The Quays retail and leisure complex in Newry which, with associated development land, is worth around £120m following a rent review and a 40% increase in rents.
O’Hare has further shopping centres in the South, including one at Carlow, which has been professionally valued recently at £64m.
Plans are under way to build two new extensions to existing properties — one at The Quays valued at £60m, and a £27m extension at Fairgreen.
He also acquired a £14m House of Fraser investment in England which, with the settlement of a pending rent review, has added a further £3m to its value.
O’Hare is expanding into eastern Europe and also North America.
With personal property and assets included, O’Hare is worth around £233m.
Aside from his business interests, the 47-year-old O’Hare is also a prominent member of the moderate SDLP in Northern Ireland and is a visiting professor at the University of Ulster, where he has endowed a chair of Property Development and Design.
Sir John and Peter Beckwith
Thames River Capital
One of the best hedge funds in the City is Thames River Capital, with £4.7bn under management. It has been valued at around £200m and Sir John Beckwith , 59, has a 25% stake. He and his brother Peter, 61, made their first fortune, around £80m, by selling their London & Edinburgh Trust property group in 1990.
Peter (left) has a stake in The Ambassador Theatre Group. It could be worth £30m, valuing his stake at £6m. He has another £7m of net assets in property companies. We value Sir John’s company, Pacific Investments II, on its £19.3m net assets.
The sale of the Centre Point tower for £85m in October 2005 also added several millions to the Beckwith coffers. Adding properties, hotels in France and Sir John’s investment in the Model Frontiers fashion agency, a £260m valuation would seem appropriate, but we cut that to £230m to allow for reinvestment of sale proceeds.
Manny Davidson & Family
BL Davidson
Manny Davidson founded a London-based property investment company in 1964, calling it Asda Property Holdings after his mother, Annie Sarah Davidson.
He floated the business in 1985, before taking it private in a £232m deal with British Land in 2001, which saw it renamed BL Davidson. It showed £440m of net assets in 2005 when it made a £12.4m profit. The Davidson family’s 50% stake was worth £253m when it was taken over entirely by British Land (which already had the other 50%).
The 75-year-old Davidson also has other choice assets. The takeover of the Leopold Joseph merchant bank in early 2004 netted him £5m for his stake. Other assets, such as the swish Putney Bridge restaurant and Fungo, a property company, add £5m, taking the Davidson family to £230m after allowing for tax on the latest British Land deal.
Patrick Doherty
Harcourt Developments
Patrick Doherty is a busy man. The Donegal-born property developer has £1.5bn in developments scheduled for Dublin, Barbados and Jersey.
He has followed the success of his 30-acre Park West business park in west Dublin by expanding into the Caribbean and embarking on the Harland & Wolff shipyard project, where he is planning a £400m redevelopment of the shipyard where the ill-fated Titanic was built.
In 2003, Doherty’s Dublin-based Harcourt Developments sealed a £47m deal for the site in Belfast, now christened Titanic Quarter.
In 2004, Harcourt’s net assets soared from £53m to £78.3m but it has shopping centres and office blocks worth £193m.
Sixty-four-year-old Doherty also has substantial hotel, transport and property assets in the Caribbean. In all, he should easily be worth £230m.
Michael Oglesby & Family
Bruntwood
Michael Oglesby’s Bruntwood operation is easily the busiest developer in Manchester. It is working on the refurbishment of the 29-storey City Tower (formerly Sunley Tower), No 1 Portland Street and SquareOne, formerly the Post Office building adjacent to Piccadilly station. Bruntwood is now estimated to be involved in one-quarter of all office deals in Manchester. Oglesby, 67, also recently bought Piccadilly Plaza for £55m from Portfolio Holdings.
Liverpool looks set to be the next target for the Oglesby makeover of tired 1960s sites. He has spent £24.5m acquiring Littlewood’s old HQ at 100 Old Hall Street from the Barclay brothers.
It was 1970 when Oglesby moved from Scunthorpe to Manchester, forming Bruntwood five years later. He chairs the Cheadle-based group, while his son, Chris, is MD.
The share structure of the various Bruntwood operations is complex but the main family operation, Bruntwood Ltd, saw its profits rise to £11.3m on £59m turnover in the year to September 2005. But its net assets rose to £117m and we value the operation on that figure. Other smaller but separate Bruntwood operations take the total net assets to at least £218m after stripping out any double-counting. In all, with other assets, the Oglesby family is worth perhaps £230m.
Stephen Vernon
Green Property
English property tycoon Stephen Vernon lives in Ireland where he has built up Green Property, a leading local developer. A chartered surveyor by trade, Vernon joined Green in 1993. Green was taken private in 2002 via a £700m deal backed by Merrill Lynch and HBOS.
Vernon, 56, set about selling £1bn of assets to pay down debt and give his backers a return on their money. “I spent three years sorting out the [management-backed] buyout, but that’s done now,” Vernon said recently. “We have ambitions to develop and grow the business again.” Vernon has his eye on a shopping centre in Ireland, which he hopes to acquire before the end of the year. He is also looking at the British market.
Merrill Lynch cashed in its chips in 2005 as part of a refinancing of the company. Vernon’s stake in the business has increased from 2% to 32%, with HBOS now owning 50%. Three other executive directors hold 15% of the equity and the balance is owned by a staff trust.
Green Property still has a strong portfolio of assets. It owns the Blanchardstown shopping centre, Ireland’s biggest retail complex; a factory outlet centre in Killarney; offices let to eBay in Leopardstown; an industrial site in west Dublin occupied by Irish Express Cargo; and a small stake in a building that houses part of Goldman Sachs’s head office in London. This portfolio was recently valued for the company at more than £700m.
Plans are afoot to “sweat” its 90 acres in Blanchardstown, estimated to be worth at least £550m. A new retail park, an extension to the shopping centre, about 100 apartments and a 200-bed hotel are all planned, with Crowne Plaza lined up as the operator. The parent company for Green Property is called Rodinheights, and in 2005 it made a profit of around £28m.
The Green property portfolio, which includes the Blanchardstown Centre, was recently revalued at nearly £700m, putting the value of Vernon’s stake at around £220m. Past bonuses should take him to £230m.
|
|
||
|
No |
Name |
Wealth (£m) |
|
62 |
James Mansfield |
267 |
|
72 |
Sean Mulryan |
234 |
|
73 |
Gerard O’Hare |
233 |
|
74 |
Patrick Doherty |
230 |
|
74 |
Stephen Vernon |
230 |
|
93 |
Michael Herbert & Family |
160 |
|
109 |
Jim McGettigan |
138 |
|
123 |
Martin Birrane |
120 |
|
123 |
Frank Burke & Family |
120 |
|
132 |
Richard Barrett |
118 |
|
132 |
Johnny Ronan |
118 |
|
134 |
Thomas Jennings & Family |
116 |
|
137 |
Frank Boyd & Family |
109 |
|
140 |
Bernard McNamara |
105 |
|
148 |
Liam Carroll & Family |
100 |
|
148 |
Bill McCabe |
100 |
|
161 |
Noel Smyth & Family |
97 |
|
163 |
Max & Malcolm McMullan |
95 |
|
174 |
David Daly |
90 |
|
187 |
Ken Rohan |
83 |
Anthony Lyons
Earls Court & Olympia
Anthony Lyons runs Earls Court & Olympia, the West London-based exhibitions group. A property developer and agent, Lyons, 39, led the takeover of Earls Court & Olympia in May 2004 for £247m, in a deal backed by Nomura, the Japanese bank.
The value of the business has shot up since and, stripped of borrowings, it is easily worth £420m. Lyons has a 60% stake.
He is also director of St James Capital, a property investor with £26m net assets in 2004-05. It should net around £50m from the break-up of The Brewery on Chiswell Street, EC1, which it bought in 2005. Other property sale proceeds and his own personal assets easily take Lyons to £215m.
Simon Clarke & Family
St Modwen
Simon Clarke is now playing a more active role in his late father’s St Modwen property group. But the move has meant that he has had to give up an executive role at the family’s Northern Racing company, which runs nine racecourses. His father, the late Sir Stanley Clarke, was a racing man through and through until his death in 2004.
Stanley Clarke started out as a plumber in the Staffordshire village where he lived, and later formed a construction business in 1966 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. He left £138.9m in his will.
Simon Clarke, 41, sits on the St Modwen board, looking after the Clarke family interests. The family stake stands at about 28.3%. The shares hit new highs earlier this year and the family stake is now worth £156m.
The Northern Racing operation has become the biggest racecourse owner after the Jockey Club. The Clarke family stake there is worth £27m. Past sale proceeds and other assets add £20m, taking the Clarke family (including Sir Stan’s estate) to £203m.
The Baylis Family(Jack Baylis deceased)
JT Baylis & Co
With Australian predators circling large shopping centres with a view to multi-million-pound takeovers, the Baylis family is sitting pretty. It was due to the late Jack Baylis’s determination that The Mall at Cribbs Causeway, Bristol’s main out-of-town shopping centre, was built at all.
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.
After Baylis teamed up with Prudential, The Mall was opened in 1998, valued at the time at £500m. The Baylis family trusts have a 30% stake now worth at least £180m. The family company, JT Baylis & Co, reflects some of that, with £120m net assets in its 2004-05 accounts. With other assets, we raise our valuation to £200m for the family.
If the Aussies strike, the Baylis family should go much higher. Sadly, Jack will not be there, as he died in September 2005, aged 85, never having seen his creation. He left £96.2m in his will, published in May 2006.
Manfred Gorvy & Family
Hanover Acceptances
South African-born accountant Manfred Gorvy runs a highly successful property, food and financial services group called Hanover Acceptances, based in London.
Sixty-eight-year-old Gorvy founded the business in 1974. One of its subsidiaries, Gerber, is Europe’s largest manufacturer of fruit juices and juice drinks. Another, Dorrington Holdings, is its property trading and development arm.
Hanover Acceptances saw its profits rise sharply from £26.4m to £233.2m on sales down nearly £30m at £486m in 2004. With £166.7m of net assets, it is easily worth £200m.
The business is owned by a Luxembourg-based parent called Quadriga Holdings SA. But we assume that the Gorvy family, which is well represented on the board, is the ultimate owner and consequently value the family at £200m.
|
|
||
|
No |
Name |
Wealth (£m) |
|
46 |
Charlotte Townshend |
390 |
|
53 |
Harry Hyams |
320 |
|
81 |
The Baylis Family |
200 |
|
123 |
John McCarthy & Family |
120 |
|
163 |
Jonathan Hitchins & Family |
95 |
|
206 |
John Berkley & Family |
72 |
|
240 |
The Earl of Radnor |
60 |
|
277 |
Mark Kay |
50 |
|
299 |
Nicholas Porter |
45 |
|
350 |
Tony Sinclair |
35 |
|
362 |
Mark Gatehouse & Family |
32 |
|
362 |
William Stone & Family |
32 |
Lord Illiffe & Family
Yattendon Investment Trust
Lord Iliffe’s son, Edward, recently bought back his press-baron grandfather’s retreat — Furzey Island near Poole — for a reputed £2.5m, so the Iliffe family can’t be doing too badly.
Certainly, Yattendon Investment Trust, the Iliffe family company, is in fine fettle. In 2004, it raised profits from £16.7m to £19.6m on sales of £95.2m. It is easily worth its £188m net assets.
Robert Peter Iliffe, 61, inherited the title from his late uncle in February 1996.
Yattendon Investment Trust had previously sold its Birmingham papers to a US publisher for £60m in 1987. It still has interests in media and TV, including Channel TV (in the Channel Islands), plus property and marina interests.
In all, we value the Iliffe family at £200m with property and estate assets.
Alan Murphy
Nikal
A new £18m office and residential development in the Ancoats district of Manchester is the latest scheme to emerge from Nikal, a fast-expanding property developer. It is 70%-owned by Alan Murphy, 58, and it aims to build up a £1bn property portfolio.
Nikal is busy developing sites in the north of England and Birmingham, with an end value of at least £350m. In late 2004, Nikal submitted plans for the £350m Masshouse scheme in Birmingham, where it is a partner.
Murphy’s wealth, though, came from more prosaic sources.
He worked for Carnation foods and Gillette before opening his own supermarket. He sold up and, in 1982, after becoming involved in the wholesale paper trade, started AM Paper, which turned big reels of tissue into toilet rolls.
Fifteen years later, in 1997, after AM had grown sharply on the back of £30m investment in new equipment, Murphy sold part of his stake for £100m and, two years later, the rest for £50m.
With the property deals and other investments, and personal assets, we reckon this fanatical supporter of Liverpool Football Club should easily be worth £200m today.
Sir Euan Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe & Family
Calthorpe Holdings
Clearly, Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe’s plans to revive the leafy Edgbaston area of Birmingham are bearing fruit. His Calthorpe Holdings operation saw its net assets rise sharply from £16.6m to £19m in 2004-05 when it made a healthy £1.4m profit on £3.4m sales.
Undoubtedly, the jewel in the crown of the 40-year-old’s plans is the £100m University Science Park plan for the former BBC site at Pebble Mill. It was in 1985 that he inherited his title from his late grandfather, and the estate was part of his inheritance. The value of the estate should easily be worth last year’s £110m.
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 also has interests in the US and property in Europe.
Conservatively, we up the valuation of the family by the £3m increase in the Calthorpe Holdings net assets, taking it to £184m.
Brian Scowcroft & Janet Lefton
Alard Properties
Rescuing Lakeland Willow mineral water may seem an odd move for Brian Scowcroft, the insurance heir turned property magnate.
In November 2005, he took over the maker of the miracle mineral water, which is famed as a cure for skin ailments. It may not be a moneyspinner, but Scowcroft has put a top team in place to run it.
But it is property where he is making his mark. In May 2006, he sold the Crossley Park Industrial Estate, in Heaton Chapel, Stockport, for £12m. Crossley Park was his first major commercial property buy and formed the basis of a property portfolio that covered more than 3m sq ft and stretched from Stockport through Leigh to Carlisle. The sale will mean that Scowcroft is likely to concentrate his resources on his major asset, the 400-acre Kingmoor Park site, near Carlisle. A new £100m road and some extra land at Scowcroft’s Carlisle development look like turning the Kingmoor Business Park into a very valuable asset.
It is six years since Scowcroft, 50, started his property development company, Alard Properties, and he plans to acquire 5m sq ft of old industrial sites in the next 10 years. He has ploughed around £7m of his own money into the 400-acre Kingmoor site and, with it, helped to create more than 1,300 jobs. It is the flagship in his business park portfolio, which includes sites in Stockport and Leigh, as well as an operation in Wrexham.
Alard, which employs eight people and turns over around £4.5m, is a world away from Scowcroft’s previous life as boss of Swinton Insurance. This was founded in the front room of his father’s house in 1957, and Ken Scowcroft built it up 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 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 Kingmoor Park (£30m net assets in 2005), the earlier Swinton proceeds and personal assets, the Scowcroft family, which includes his low-key sister, Janet Lefton, 48, is now worth £180m.
David Pearl
Structadene
David Pearl enjoyed his tomato and olive focaccia loaf at a recent lunch with top banker Lazard so much that he went away with a loaf tucked under his arm.
Despite such scavenging, Pearl is not short of a bob or two, as his London property company, Structadene, controls 1,200 properties running the length of the country, with an annual rent roll of £90m.
In November 2005, Pearl bought 431-451 Oxford Street from the Duke of Westminster for £70m. Clearly, then, this keen cyclist is not showing any sign of slowing down, even at the age of 60.
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 it.
In 1965, Pearl went into property, managing flats and factories, and never looked back. Structadene saw its profits rise sharply from £7.6m to £12.8m on much higher sales of £49.4m in the year to September 2005. But its net assets rose sharply from £102.5m to nearly £178m.
We value Structadene on the net assets. Pearl’s stake is worth £173m, and we add £5m for his stakes in smaller companies and his past salaries.
Alan Lewis
J&J Crombie
Leeds-based J&J Crombie is busy opening new stores for its gents’ woollen topcoats, favoured by generations of City slickers, heads of state and youth cults. It aims to open 15 Crombie stores across Britain in city centres and then in airports.
The business, now 201 years old, has moved production overseas and its old manufacturing sites are being redeveloped as housing or logistics centres.
The business is owned by Alan Lewis, 68, a low-key Manchester-born businessman, who came to prominence in the early 1980s through the battle to control Illingworth Morris, the Yorkshire-based textiles group. Since then, he has diversified into other areas such as property, forestry and natural resources.
His British property portfolio, principally old industrial sites in Yorkshire, is worth at least £75m. In addition, he has 4,000 acres of prime development land in Florida and forests in Russia covering an area the size of Wales.
With other banking, hi-tech and property assets added in Britain, the US and Spain, Lewis is easily worth £175m.
David Gabbay & Family
O&H Capital
O&H Capital, the London-based property company, is planning to spend £250m on UK property this year, aiming to increase its portfolio to almost £1bn. The company is now cash-rich, after selling a residential site to George Wimpey for more than £55m in November 2005.
O&H is run by low-key property man David Gabbay, 62, who, with his family and trusts, owns half the business. It made £19.5m profit on £55.4m sales in 2004-05, but it has nearly £294m net assets and should easily be worth £300m.
In all, we reckon Gabbay and his family must be worth around £170m with past salaries (over £19m from 2001-05) and dividends.
