The Duke of Buccleuch
Buccleuch Estate
The Duke of Buccleuch, 83, reckons he is a “rusting figurehead” at Buccleuch Estate, the property company which is selling off smaller assets in a drive to build a £500m portfolio of larger assets. Its subsidiary, Buccleuch Property, has a £250m portfolio. The results of the property expansion are apparent in Buccleuch Estates’ 2004 accounts, showing a healthy £6.5m profit on £29m sales, with net assets rising to nearly £61m.
The group is also looking to build houses on Buccleuch land and has expanded into new areas such as animal feed. But Buccleuch has a very small stake in the business, so we discount talk of a £500m portfolio-to-be from our sums. Still, his art and furniture is regarded by those in the know as “some of the finest” in Britain. Indeed, the furniture has been described to us as “without equal in the land”.
We keep the value of these art treasures to £525m. But valuable as they might be, Buccleuch simply can’t realise anything like this money. Any sale would automatically result in at least an 80% estate duty bill from the Treasury, the rate that applied when his father died in 1973. But even if he were to sell them all and pay a £400m-plus tax bill, the very act of a sale would probably depress what is a limited market.
Buccleuch has also had to bear a hefty loss on the theft of the £16m work Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna with the Yarnwinder, stolen in August 2003 from Drumlanrig Castle, his Borders seat. It was insured for just £3.5m.
So, despite the art, the 270,000 acres and four stately homes (all enormously expensive to maintain), we cautiously raise him to £75m this year as a result of the rise in the net asset values at Buccleuch Estates. This will probably result in an angry letter (yet again) from His Grace.
202 £75m
William & Robert Harris
Harris Commercial Vehicles
The Harris brothers William, 73, and Robert, 65 own Harris Commercial Vehicles, a Dublin-based truck dealer with franchises for Iveco, Hino and Isuzu.
The brothers have various companies with names such as Warpspeed (£2.2m net assets) and Winterblue (£2.8m net assets). They also have a large property portfolio.
Robert won a £6m tax rebate in 2005 using a loophole for the refurbishment of the Christina O, one of the world’s costliest yachts. But the multi-millionaire truck dealer is still facing a high court challenge from HM Revenue & Customs over the tax relief he claimed in respect of his involvement in a Cook Islands partnership that owns the yacht. Still, the Harris brothers are worth £75m.
Bakir Cola & Family
Cola Holdings
Spanish hotel giant NH Hotels bought the Harrington Hall hotel in London for nearly £50m in
2005 from the 64-year-old Bakir Cola, who runs and owns Cola Holdings, a London-based property-to-hotels group.
Cola Holdings saw its profits rise sharply in the year to September 2005, from just £1.3m to £19.9m on £39m sales.
Cautiously, as ever, we value the litigious Mr Cola’s business on its sharply higher £69m net assets, adding another £5m to the Cola family for property and past salaries and dividends.
Albert Perry & Family
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 company PSIT, which agreed a £247m takeover by the MEPC group in September 1997. Perry, 82, and his family trusts collected £40m in cash from the deal.
We add £23m for the family farming, property and stud company, Cromwell Holdings, with £22.8m of net assets in 2004-05.
A further £9.6m of net assets in two companies, Stonplan and Cromwell Investments, take the Perry family to £73m.
Sir John Mactaggart & Family
Mactaggart Heritable
Kier Hardie’s treasurer’s firm remains in good hands
Glasgow-based property group Mactaggart Heritable saw its net assets rise sharply in 2004 by nearly £10m to £62.7m. It is still a money-making machine turning in an exceptional £2.3m profit on £5.8m sales. Deals in 2004 included the £7m purchase of the Quality Hotel, Kensington, London. Since the year-end the group has realised $7m (£3.7m) from an investment in New York property and increased its investment in 589 Fifth Avenue in New York’s jewellery district.
Mactaggart Heritable is chaired by baronet Sir John Mactaggart, 55, pictured with his wife; his younger sister is Fiona Mactaggart, Labour MP for Slough.
The company was founded by their great-grandfather. Also called Sir John, he was an active Labour man and was treasurer of the first branch of the Labour Party under Kier Hardie. While he travelled third class, the family can do better today. We value the business on the net asset figure, adding £9m for past dividends.
John Berkley & Family
The Berkeley Leisure Group
John Berkley chairs The Berkeley Leisure Group, a largely family-owned mobile home operator and property developer based in Yeovil.
In 2004, its profits rose sharply from £6.7m to £9.6m on sales up smartly at £18.2m. With £47.7m net assets, the company is easily worth £70m. The shares are largely owned by the 72-year-old Berkley and his family. They take little out of the business and we value the family at £72m with other assets.
Malcolm Scott
Dunalastair Estates
Malcolm Scott is one of Scotland’s up-and-coming businessmen. After agricultural college, he went to learn about his family’s grain business, with a spell at a London commodity broker.
Returning to Edinburgh, he kept working at the grain operation and also started his own business, Dunalastair Estates, specialising in all areas of property and land.
When his father retired, Scott took over the grain operation. But in the 1990s, he undertook a wide range of property deals in London, Edinburgh and Northern Ireland. In addition, recognising the housing requirement in the Edinburgh environs, he acquired a very large site in East Lothian in 1998, which is now incorporated in the local structure plan.
Scott’s grain interests, held via Swarland (Grain Dryers) and Philip Wilson (Grain), have around £8m of net assets in their 2004-05 accounts. They are worth £11m easily. His land and property interests add £49m, while a 50% stake in a planned coal-fired power station in Pakistan is worth £10m.
A prominent Tory in Scotland, Scott, who is 42, also has £2m of other assets, taking him to £72m.
Robert Bourne & Sally Green Happy Badge Projects and Old Vic Productions
Keeping jazz at Ronnie Scott’s
Property entrepreneur Robert Bourne, 56, and his theatre impresario wife Sally Greene, 52, bought Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London’s Soho in July 2005 for £3m. Bourne and his brother Graham originally built up the Local London property group from a £6m float in 1986 to when it was sold for £110m in a takeover in 1989. They had 15% and should have received £16.5m. Robert Bourne owns Happybadge Projects, with £43.2m net assets in its 2003 accounts. He has a £10m flat in Mayfair. His wife’s theatre portfolio includes the Old Vic. As chief executive of Old Vic Productions and co-producer of Billy Elliot The Musical, she is entitled to 20% of the show’s profits. With the rise in property prices in London, the couple should easily be worth £70m.
Jack Brignall & Family
Wykeland
Hull Truck Theatre was the beneficiary of Jack Brignall’s largesse early in 2005. His Wykeland property group donated tens of thousands of pounds to the theatre’s appeal. Wykeland, formed in 1970 by Brignall regarded by his peers as a brilliant salesman is now heavily involved in developing the £65m Europarc on the outskirts of Grimsby, where 1,200 people are already at work for a number of leading food manufacturers.
Brignall, 79, sold his original company, truck distributor Tillotson, in the early 1960s before starting up again with Wykeland. The Hull-based business had £65.4m of net assets in 2004-05, when it made a record £7.3m profit. Wykeland has developed over 8m sq ft since it started, and has 2m sq ft in its portfolio. Going forward, the company has a £250m development programme for the next five years, much of which will be in Yorkshire. We value the business near the net asset figure. Other assets will take the Brignall family to at least £70m.
Joey Esfandi
Dwyer Estates
London-based Esfandi has been active in property development and construction since the early 1970s. He set up his own property business, Winglaw, in 1980 and 12 years later became chief executive of the quoted Dwyer Estates.
Esfandi, who is 55, sold Winglaw in 2000 to Warner Estate for over £100m, netting £52m from the deal for himself and family trusts.
He had already taken Dwyer private in 1998 and continues his property development work at the company, which turned from a small loss to a near-£1m profit in 2004-05. With his sale proceeds, and his stake in Dwyer, we still value Esfandi at £70m.
Ray Horney
Real Estate Opportunities
Real Estate Opportunities, the listed property vehicle, saw its pretax profit rise more than fourfold in 2005 while its net assets more than doubled in value during the year to £184m. The company, chaired by Ray Horney, also made its first foray into China with a £4m investment in China Real Estate Opportunities.
For 70-year-old Horney, it is a long way from his early career 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. Three years later, Horney made another £27m when it was sold.
The solid performance by Real Estate Opportunities has pushed his stake there up in value to £8m. In all, he has stakes in six quoted companies worth around £14m. Share sales, other assets and stakes in other quoted companies take him to around £70m.
James Lambert & Family
Lynton
James Lambert started off by studying law and history of art at Cambridge and then moved into the esoteric world of London’s Bond Street galleries, becoming a director at Colnaghi.
His grandfather, Jacob Lottenberg, came to the UK from Poland at the time of the first world war. The family built up property assets and created Lynton in the 1950s with the purchase of a publicly quoted company, Valley of Rocks Hotel (Lynton), whose only asset was a hotel in Devon.
Having been at the forefront of the building boom in the 1960s and 1970s, the family firm won the now-dubious honour of being famed for putting Croydon on the map. However, the £220m sale of the Lynton business to BAA in 1988 provided the Lambert family with around £20m.
James Lambert was then entrusted to continue the family’s long-standing property tradition. By the time BAA took over, Lynton had gained a reputation as a developer in the UK and mainland Europe.
Since then, the 49-year-old Lambert has quietly been building up a property portfolio (valued at £30m way back in 1996) with tenants such as Burger King and Anglian Water.
There is also Lisburne Holdings, another property company, which Lambert owns directly or via trusts. It showed £3.6m net assets in 2004. With other assets such as art and private property, we still value the Lambert family at around £70m.
The Earl of Yarborough
CYZ Properties
Carrying on the tradition of the boxing day hunt
Lord Yarborough led the Brockelsby Hunt at its first Boxing Day meet since the ban on hunting came into force with defiant words: “Every civilised society in history has allowed hunting. The only society it was banned in was Nazi Germany.”
Yarborough, 42, succeeded his father to the title in 1991. There is plenty of land for the hunt as his Lincolnshire estate runs to 28,000 acres. Yarborough’s father left £67m in his will.
Yarborough has around half of CYZ Properties, which had £1.8m net assets in 2003-04 and paid out £600,000 dividends the previous year. But other CYZ companies have been losing money and we value Yarborough at £70m to reflect this.
Alan & Edward Lee
Princeton Investments
Showing confidence in the regional property market, Princeton Investments bought a £24m office block in Leeds with a partner in late 2005.
Princeton is run by Alan and Edward Lee, respectively 49 and 47, the sons of Arnold Lee, one of London’s great developers of the 1950s. He built up Imry Properties and in 1987, before the stock market crash, sold his family’s 39% stake for over £20m. Since then, his sons have been quietly running the family’s property interests.
Though Princeton showed a £33,000 loss on £346,000 sales in 2003-04, it has some impressive assets. In 1989, the FT reported it had a hefty £150m portfolio, £110m abroad. In late 2004, the family bought Hagley House in the leafy Edgbaston area of Birmingham, paying £7.1m for the 17-storey building. But we stick at £70m for the family.
David Lewis & Family
Marylebone Property Holdings
Chartered surveyor David Lewis, 67, ran three quoted property firms in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s: Cavendish, Hampton Trust and Molyneux Estates. With impeccable timing, he sold a number of businesses at the top of the market, including Hampton Trust, which fetched £100m just before the
1987 crash. Lewis received £25m for his 25% stake in Hampton, proving he is one of the top property men in the UK. He came out of semi-retirement in 2003 to develop a £150m office complex near London’s Euston Station.
His family has at least £30m of stakes in a number of companies including Marylebone Property Holdings, Ledale Investments and Molyneux Securities. With other assets, we now value the Lewis family at around £70m.
The Marquess of Northampton
Castle Ashby Estate
The Northampton name has been in the gossip columns of late. But it is daughter Lady Emily Compton, who is making the news. First, she was being squired around town by ageing crooner Bryan Ferry, and then she was linked to a top City fund manager. Still, the old man had his share of the gossip columns in his heyday. Known as “Spenny” to his friends, he has been married five times.
Castle Ashby is one of his two Midland estates, and Spenny, 60, is forever looking to new money-making schemes, such as weddings and conferences, to help pay the bills. Yet with his other estate, Compton Wynyates, Spenny has 25,000 acres, plus another 5,000 acres in Surrey. His London estate around Canonbury has several buildings including the old Tower Theatre and the Canonbury Academy, which made £274,000 profit on £798,000 sales in 2004-05. In recent years, he has been embroiled in controversy over the Sevso collection, which he bought hoping to sell it at a vast profit. But its provenance can’t be proved so there are no buyers.
Northampton sued the lawyers who advised him on the deal and settled out of court for a reputed £24m in 2000. Yet he had already spent easily that on his legal battles over the treasure and its purchase price. There is an evident need for cash hence the weddings and events at Castle Ashby, and the sale of his Jamaica estate. While the various assets add up to hefty wealth, four dissolved marriages and the Sevso fiasco will have hurt Spenny, and we keep him at £70m.
Jeremy Agace
Hambro Countrywide
Jeremy Agace continues to keep a low profile, apart from his passion for racing veteran cars at the Goodwood Revival meeting.
Having left Britain in the 1980s for Monte Carlo following the sale of his estate agency business, Agace, 66, followed his father as chairman of estate agency Mann. In 1985, it floated on the stock market and a year later merged to form Hambro Countrywide. His proceeds from this were £37m.
As a tax exile, his wealth and other assets will have grown to perhaps £68m. Our spies report that Agace is a keen racer of classic Ferraris. He also has a 50% stake in a Shropshire-based company called Sporting Guns.
Nick Capstick-Dale
UK Real Estate
A new Covent Garden-style leisure-to-retail complex complete with a theatre and theatre school has just received planning permission and is being built by Nick Capstick-Dale in the heart of London’s King’s Cross area. With Eurostar trains set to use the station from 2007, and a huge regeneration project under way, he is clearly in the right area at the right time.
Capstick-Dale, 44, 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. A year later, he was buying back some of his assets at a 40% discount. Since then, through his main company, UK Real Estate, based in London, he has been assembling an impressive long-term portfolio.
UK Real Estate showed around £11.7m assets in its 2003-04 accounts, but in total Capstick-Dale has net business assets of around £64m. We add £4m for property and personal assets, taking him to £68m.
Edward Holdings
Former school teacher Gerry Barrett is a leading property developer from Galway. He has been active all over Ireland with new developments, and in recent months has spent £45m acquiring new sites in Galway and Waterford. He recently opened a £140m retail and leisure development on the south bank of the River Boyne in Drogheda. All told, he has around £175m worth of development work under way through his Edward Holdings operation.
He came to prominence in Britain in 2005 by buying London’s Bow Street police station for around £12.5m.
Although Edward Holdings has few assets, we can see £33m of net assets in the 2003-04 accounts of four separate companies owned by Edward Holdings or by Barrett and his family. Barrett’s other assets include University Hall on Hatch Street off Leeson Street in Dublin 2, which he bought for around £10m. He is also behind a £100m development of houses and apartments at Edward Square in Donnybrook and the Wellpark scheme in Galway.
With these schemes coming along, we value Barrett, 54, and his family at £66m and rising fast.
Bertram Group
Kip Bertram and his late mother Elsie started Bertram Books in a disused Norwich chicken shed; it is now Britain’s largest independent book wholesaler. In February 1999, it merged with Cypher, a public library supplier, in a £54m deal which effectively valued the Bertram family stake at £35m.
Kip Bertram, 62, is no longer in the book trade, having moved into property development and investment in hi-tech firms. As a result, the family’s asset wealth has now grown to £66m.
Grainger Trust
A pillar of the community and family representative
Robert Dickinson is deputy lieutenant of Northumberland and a major figure in the North East business community. He sits on the board of numerous local companies, including property group Grainger Trust, of which he is chairman. The wider Dickinson family has at least a £50m stake, held both beneficially and in trust. Other assets, such as a family-owned company Cross House Buildings (with £1.2m net assets) and property, should take the Dickinson family to £66m easily. Chief executive Rupert Dickinson, 46, is here representing the family.
Graham Harris
Sunlight Projects
Graham Harris owns Sunlight Projects, a London-based property operation, where he is also a director. The company specialises in the fast-moving and ever-changing London lettings market.
Its forte is the luxury end of the market in central London locations, and it’s a formula that works well. In the year to April 2005, Sunlight made a £156,000 profit on £17.5m sales, but it has seen its net assets jump sharply from £49.4m to £65.8m and we value the business on the net assets. We value Harris, 59, at £66m.
Daniel & Martin Tannen
Tannen Group
Newts will not be very popular with the Tannen family. A rare species of amphibian has held up plans for a multi-million-pound retirement village in Wiltshire being co-developed by the family’s Tannen Group. It had applied to build a 60-bed care home and around 200 living-assisted flats on the old RAF site at Rudloe Manor and plans an appeal against planners’ rejection of the scheme on the grounds that not enough information had been supplied about the development’s effect on the newts.
London-based Tannen run by Daniel, 49, and Martin, 51 saw its profits rise from £3.7m to £6.3m in 2004-05, but taking on more debt has reduced net assets from £50m to £24.3m. We value the business at around £40m. The Tannens and family trusts own all the shares. We add another £21.3m for other Tannen business assets we can see, including Gladehurst Properties with £14m net assets. We also add another £4.7m for dividends and salaries after tax, taking the Tannen family to perhaps £66m.
Berish Berger & Family
Greaterheaven and Makepiece Investments
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 grandson, Berish, 50, and he is a director of more than 108 companies. In around 50 of them, including Greaterheaven and Makepeace Investments, there are nearly £100m net assets in the 2004 and 2005 accounts. But because of duplication and some outside shareholders, we value the Berger family stakes at £65m.
Eamon Cleary
Sion Developments
Eamon Cleary left school at 11 to work on the family farm in Ballybay, Ireland. Apprenticed to a blocklayer at 15, two years later he started a building business and by 20 had a precast concrete and steel company. Cleary went on to develop one of the largest agricultural supply businesses in Ireland, which he sold in 1991.
Five years later, he moved to New Zealand, where he later became a citizen. He holds substantial investments in dairy farms in central Southland and commercial property in Queenstown, Wanaka and Auckland. He divested about one-quarter of his portfolio in 2004 to benefit from the booming New Zealand market.
Forty-six-year-old Cleary now has interests in Australia, eastern Europe and Ireland, and is developing telecommunications and agricultural businesses in Argentina and Chile. He also owns horses, including Rand, a thoroughbred who has won races in Japan, the US and England.
He returns regularly to Ireland and retains a strong love of Irish culture. He has had the Eamon Cleary chair in Irish studies at Otago University, New Zealand, named after him. There are about 600,000 Kiwis of Irish heritage and Cleary’s contribution for the new post was matched by the government.
In Ireland, he has Sion Developments, a tiny Mullingar-based property operation. But the New Zealand National Business Review Rich List put his fortune at £65m in 2005. We agree.
Michael Heller
London & Associated Properties
The sharp rise in the share price at London & Associated Properties pushed its value to nearly £91m by early 2006. This is good news for the Heller family, led by 70-year-old Michael Heller, which has around a 55% stake worth nearly £50m.
Heller, an accountant by trade, and his father built up and sold KP Nuts to United Biscuits in 1968. Heller shrewdly invested his wealth in property. London & Associated Properties, which the Hellers have controlled since the early 1970s, specialises in shopping centres.
Over the past five years, L&AP, which Heller chairs and where his son John is chief executive, has expanded dramatically, with large centres in Sheffield, Windsor and St Helens. Family stakes in the quoted Bisichi Mining, where son Andrew is chief executive, and Electronic Data Processing, together with other privately owned investments and homes, take the Hellers to around £65m.
Peter Levy & Family
Shaftesbury
He may have retired as chairman of the quoted Shaftesbury property group, but Peter Levy will be delighted with its recent performance. In the year to September 2005, its net asset value rose by 29% and the shares hit a record high by mid-2006. The stake Levy holds in the business is now worth £12m.
Shaftesbury is the leading developer in London’s Covent Garden and has been instrumental in revitalising the area.
Levy, 66, learnt his business from his father, a major player in the property world 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.
With Levy’s remaining Shaftesbury stake, past share sales, other assets and the Stock Conversion sale, the Levy family is worth perhaps £65m.
John Cutts
Parkridge Holdings
In fighting form for old MOD site
Having just finished a £45m project at Brighton’s Marina, Midland property tycoon John Cutts is now involved in a battle with protesters over plans for a new distribution hub at an old MOD engine-testing site at Farnborough in Hampshire. With the Pru, he paid £54m for the 130-acre site.
Cutts, who is 47, made his first fortune in 1998 selling the Kingspark Developments business to US firm ProLogis, and netting around £30m for his 33% stake.
After that, Cutts set up on his own with Parkridge Holdings, which saw its profits soar from £5.3m to £15m in 2004 on sales up from £73.2m to £101m. It is worth £80m, valuing Cutts’ 54% stake at £43m.
With his earlier proceeds, he is worth £65m after tax.
The Loftus Family
Loftus Family Properties
Accu.2 watches, worn by celebrities and modelled on high streets, are the latest hot fashion item from Accurist Watches. The unlikely kings of this bling are Anthony Loftus, 54, and his brothers Andrew and Richard, who run the business started by their late father.
The Loftus family also owns a large amount of property in the Baker Street area of London. The Loftus Family Properties operation had a coup in late 2005 when its 51,000 sq ft redevelopment at 22 Baker Street, W1, which was built after one of Westminster’s longest-running planning battles, attracted technology company Fujitsu. The mock-Georgian building, empty since its completion in 2003, became Fujitsu’s new London headquarters on a 10-year lease.
In 1990, the Loftus family received £22m for the sale of a property. Accurist made £1.5m profit in 2004-05, but adding part of the £693,000 directors’ pay to the bottom line would push the profit to perhaps £2m. That justifies a £20m valuation easily. A £65m price-tag is a conservative estimate.
David McLean & Family
David McLean Holdings
David McLean recently won the auction for the first parcel of land to be sold as part of Liverpool’s King’s Dock rebirth. Aside from that, the former North Wales brickie has made a name developing Birmingham’s Masshouse and St Austell’s town centre.
McLean, 63, who moved into housebuilding in the 1970s, has also built his eponymous construction group into one of the major contractors in Wales. A float has been mooted but nothing has thus far materialised.
In the year to June 2005, parent company David McLean made £5m profit on £206.7m sales. Adding McLean’s £1.35m salary to the bottom line takes the profit to over £6m and justifies a £60m valuation. The McLean family owns it all. McLean has had over £10m in salary since 2000. After tax and spending, we value the McLean family at £65m.
John & Ciara Byrne
Carlisle Trust
John Byrne, who is now 86, has been building up his Dublin-based property empire since the 1960s. He is a leading supplier of office space to the public sector.
With his 64-year-old wife, Ciara, and family trusts, his interests are held mainly through the Carlisle Trust, which showed nearly £40m net assets in its 2004 accounts, up by £5m from the previous year’s £35m.
But other assets should take the Byrne family to £64m.
Richard Harris & Family
Cardinal Group
Cardinal Group, a fast-growing London-based property company, is run by chartered surveyor Richard Harris, 61, who has more than 100 directorships.
Cardinal is Harris’s most significant company, with £57.5m of net assets in 2004-05. His family has a 66% stake worth over £38m. The family also has stakes in nine companies and the total value of those stakes is another £25m in net asset terms. We value the Harris family at £63m.
Lord Rana & Family
Andras House
Showing his continued confidence in the Northern Irish economy, Lord Rana, now 68, has put in a planning application for a new four-star, 215-bedroom hotel in Belfast’s city centre. It will be part of a global franchise and adjacent to a three-star hotel already run by Rana’s Andras House operation.
Rana was raised to the peerage in 2004, for economic and charitable work he has undertaken in Northern Ireland.
Arriving from India at Heathrow Airport in 1963 with no money but a degree in Economics, Rana expected to secure a clerical job to suit his civil service background. None was forthcoming, and he spent three years working double shifts at a foundry and for the Post Office, during which time he saved £1,400. The only way forward, he decided, was to open a business.
The only one he could afford was a run-down café in central Belfast. He managed to gain the lease and, after refurbishing it, he doubled the opening hours and renamed it The Quality Curry House. It was the first in the city, and within 18 months he had trebled turnover. By 1969, he had two more restaurants and all was well. But the Troubles began and central Belfast was blitzed by IRA bombs. Trade disappeared and he sold the first café at a loss while the other two were bombed out.
Using his £295 bomb damage compensation, Rana borrowed £14,000 from the bank, went into the property business and opened a boutique. In the 1980s, Rana became obsessed with the idea of building a new hotel and in 1990 he opened the Plaza, Belfast’s first hotel for 20 years. It was bombed three times in its first two years, but Rana did not give up, and in the next four years his Andras House property-to-hotels group opened three more. The group is benefiting from the current peace settlement in Northern Ireland.
Andras House, owned by the Rana family, had £42.5m net assets in 2004-05. We add £20m for private assets, property, plus other businesses such as the Ashoka Restaurant and Belfast Plaza.
John Kennedy & Family
Kenmore Investments
Focusing on Europe and its industrial warehousing
Europe is where the action is for John Kennedy’s Kenmore property operation. A portfolio of 92 supermarkets in Sweden, Kenmore’s second new territory after France, was sold in 2005, and the group is now also invested in Norway, Holland, Belgium, Germany and Finland, with a focus on industrial warehousing.
But Kennedy, 55, is a Scotsman through and through. After qualifying as a chartered surveyor, he left his native Ayrshire to see the world. 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 his bagpipes.
After building up a marina business in the West Indies, he returned to Scotland to start the Kenmore Property Group. He and his family trusts own all the company, which made £11.8m profit and showed £49.5m net assets in 2004-05. The company is easily worth £55m on these figures. Other assets, including stakes in Forthway and Kenmore Homes, plus past dividends and salaries, take the Kennedy family to £62m easily.
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|
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|
No |
Name |
Wealth (£m) |
|
18 |
Sir Tom Hunter |
780 |
|
22 |
Keith Miller & Family |
715 |
|
23 |
David Murray |
650 |
|
59 |
Robert Adair |
278 |
|
119 |
Sir Tom Farmer |
122 |
|
145 |
Shaf Rasul |
102 |
|
181 |
Sir Fraser & Gordon Morrison |
88 |
|
202 |
The Duke of Buccleuch |
75 |
|
206 |
Sir John Mactaggart & Family |
72 |
|
206 |
Malcolm Scott |
72 |
|
235 |
John Kennedy & Family |
62 |
|
249 |
David Stevenson & Family |
58 |
|
258 |
Oliver & Hugo Burge |
55 |
|
277 |
Jack Hamilton |
50 |
|
299 |
Louis Goodman & Family |
45 |
|
321 |
Ben Brodie |
41 |
|
324 |
Iain Wotherspoon |
40 |
|
343 |
John Smart |
37 |
|
375 |
Barrie Clapham |
31 |
|
379 |
Gerald Atkinson & Family |
30 |
Edward Lonergan
Deramore Holdings
Edward Lonergan comes from Belfast and owns and runs Deramore Holdings, a highly profitable property developer and construction company.
Incorporated in 1987, Deramore saw its profits fall slightly from £8m to £7.9m in the year to March 2005, but with net assets of over £54.8m, Deramore is easily worth £55m. Lonergan also has 50% of Lochinver, a property company with £6.3m net assets and a £3.2m stake in Deramore.
We value Lonergan, 55, at £62m in all, with other assets.
John Morgan
Morgan Sindall
John Morgan chairs Morgan Sindall, the quoted London-based construction company specialising in office design, property investment and refurbishment.
The shares have soared on the back of a strong performance. Its fit-out division has won £231m of new work in 2006, and its infrastructure division has landed £330m in orders, including a two-year extension to its water framework contract with Scottish Water Solutions. Fifty-year-old Morgan says: “All of our market sectors are growing, which offers exciting opportunities and provides a positive outlook for the group.”
As a result, Morgan’s stake is now worth £48m after a £12m share sale in August 2005. He also has family stakes worth over £2m in small property companies. After tax, and allowing for the share sale, a previous £2m sale in August 2004, and over £1m a year in salaries and dividends recently, Morgan should be worth £62m.
John De Stefano
De Stefano Investment Corporation
John De Stefano is well known as an investor and a retail property agent on the property scene. He used to work with his ex-wife, Felicity Devonshire, who is also making waves in property circles. The pair had worked together as a partnership for 20 years but, following their divorce, he bought her share in the portfolio of their company London & Henley Holdings in the middle of 2003.
He is also a major shareholder in a consortium which paid £7m for a group of seven restaurants, which included Aubergine in Fulham and L’Oranger in St James’s in December 2004. Although De Stefano, 61, has 70 directorships, his main parent operation, De Stefano Investment Corporation, is his main asset. In 2004-05, it made a £422,343 profit on £9.8m sales. But it has nearly £57m of net assets. It is owned entirely by De Stefano and we value him at around £61m with other assets.
Simon & Paul Upward
Ocobase
Brothers Simon and Paul Upward, aged 45 and 43, run and own Ocobase, a Croydon-based property company. In 2005-06, its profits rose from £4.3m to £5.9m on £8.7m sales. Its net assets moved up sharply from £45m to £52.1m. With low borrowings, it is worth that figure. We add another £9m for other assets, including property companies Bayside Investments and Sima Investments, taking the Upwards to £61m.
Mike Bell
Parkridge Holdings
Long-time Jersey resident Mike Bell, who is 58, has interests in French property and shopping centres in England. A canny investor, his total portfolio is worth around £60m. He is on the board of Parkridge Holdings, a fast-growing London-based property group.
Parkridge, which made £15m profit on £101m sales in 2004, is worth £60m. Bell has a 25% stake worth £15m.
240 £60m
Terence Cole
City & General Group
Low-key property man Terence Cole has more than 330 directorships. But his key company is City & General Group, where he has a 40% stake. Its main subsidiary, Compco Holdings, made a £29.5m profit in
2004-05 and showed £138.3m net assets. After allowing for outside shareholders, Cole’s stake is worth around £45m.
We can see smaller Cole stakes in other companies such as Industrial Securities Group and Victoria Docks Hotel, which should take 74-year-old Cole to £60m easily.
Leonard Eppel & Family
Arrowcroft Holdings
Leonard Eppel chairs Arrowcroft Holdings, a London-based property company. He holds 71% of the shares directly, with the rest owned by family members. The Eppel family also owns a large portfolio of shopping centres and industrial storage parks in Britain and Europe. Eppel, 78, was also the government’s main adviser on the redevelopment of Liverpool’s Albert Dock.
The Eppel family is currently involved in a £300m regeneration scheme in Croydon. A planned merger with Everard Goodman’s Tops Estates discussed some years ago never materialised. Eppel runs the company with his son-in-law.
In 2004, Arrowcroft showed £30.2m net assets. With its assets outside Arrowcroft, the Eppel family is easily worth £60m.
