David Ross, 45, the colourful co-founder of Carphone Warehouse, has helped shore up his property company Kandahar this week by entering into discussions to sell Drake Circus shopping centre in Plymouth, Devon, to British Land for £235m (p40).
The Conservative Party backer is also understood to be in talks to place the rest of the circa-£200m Kandahar property empire – a joint venture with US investment bank Morgan Stanley – into a jv with a new partner.
The sales will help appease Lloyds Banking Group, which has been seeking to refinance Kandahar after it breached its banking covenants in July 2009.
The entrepreneurial Ross was born into a Grimsby family that once owned Europe’s largest fishing fleet before expanding into food processing. In 1991, aged 24, he joined Carphone Warehouse, the company set up by schoolfriend Charles Dunstone.
In 2003, Ross made his first foray into the commercial property market, setting up Kandahar. Three years later, it was injected into a £500m jv with Morgan Stanley, whose assets included Drake Circus.
Over the years, Ross amassed an estimated £873m fortune that led him to be crowned the 87th richest man in the UK in the Sunday Times Rich List in 2008.
However, later that same year, Ross was investigated for allegedly pledging around £130m of shares in Carphone Warehouse and other public companies to fund his private interests.
The storm cost him his roles as non-executive director at storage firm Big Yellow, chairman at National Express and deputy chairman of Carphone Warehouse. He also stepped down from his position as chairman of Cosalt, the marine safety firm once run by his grandfather, but remained a director. And it cost him his role as Olympics financial adviser to London mayor Boris Johnson.
Ross was later cleared of any wrongdoing by the Financial Services Authority.
Ross has also emerged as a smooth political operator, donating considerable sums to the Tories. He famously flew David Cameron in a private helicopter to HBOS in Halifax the day after the bank bailout last year, and treated him to a ticket to watch England play in the 2006 World Cup finals. He maintains his Grimsby links via the Havelock Academy, which he found in 2008, in the old docks area of the town.
As well as his business and political prowess, Ross’s high-profile love life has also kept him firmly in the gossip columns. He dated Ali Cockayne, the former girlfriend of England rugby star Will Carling, in the late 1990s. He has a son, Carl Cosmo Thomas, with former lap-dancer Michelle Ross, whom he met in a chance encounter at Heathrow airport in 2001. He then went on to date former Ralph Lauren model Saffron Aldridge.
Ross now divides his time between his houses in Switzerland, Knightsbridge, Mustique in the West Indies, and Neville Holt, a sprawling estate and grade I-listed mansion, which once housed his prep school, in Leicestershire.
annabel.dixon@estatesgazette.com
