Fracking and chemicals billionaire Jim Ratcliffe increased his wealth by more than £15bn last year to take the crown as Britain’s richest person, with a £21bn fortune.
Ratcliffe, 65, has overtaken the Hinduja brothers, to take the Sunday Times Rich List title thanks to a huge increase in value of his petrochemical company Ineos, the UK’s biggest fracking firm.
Ratcliffe, who was brought up in a council house near Manchester, the son of a joiner and office manager, founded Ineos in 1998 and still owns 60% of the firm that made profits of more than £2.2bn last year and employs 18,500 people. Ratcliffe, who lives in a mansion near Beaulieu in the New Forest and owns two superyachts called Hampshire and Hampshire II, jumped from 18th to first place in the rich list.
Ratcliffe is among a record 145 billionaires in the list – 11 more than recorded in the 2017 edition. The 1,000 richest people in the UK now share a record total wealth of £724bn, up 10% on last year’s figure. It now takes £115m to join even the richest 1,000 people.
While Ratcliffe celebrates a huge increase in his wealth, the rich list reveals that Topshop owner Sir Philip Green and his wife Lady Green’s fortune was marked down by £787m to £2bn.
The list authors said the Greens’ fortunes were revised down owing to concerns about their Arcadia high street fashion empire, which includes Burton, Miss Selfridge and Topshop. The fall in the Greens’ estimated wealth comes on top of a £433m fall for the pair in the 2017 list after the collapse of BHS, which Green sold for £1 to Dominic Chappell.
TV chef Jamie Oliver fell out the rankings after the closure of 12 of his 37 Jamie’s Italian restaurants as part of a rescue deal with creditors to keep the restaurant group trading.
Pharmaceuticals heir Ernesto Bertarelli and his wife, Kirsty, are the biggest fallers in the list. Their estimated fortune declined by £1.8bn owing to the fall in Ernesto’s stakes in various pharmaceutical firms. They fall from sixth to 11th, and Kirsty slips from the richest woman on the list to the third richest, having been leapfrogged by Heineken heiress Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken and packaging heiress Kirsten Rausing. There are now a record 141 women on the list.
The Mumbai-born Hinduja siblings Sri, 82, and Gopi, 78, who control a vast range of business investments under the Hinduja Group, spanning oil and gas, IT, energy, media, banking, property and healthcare, are second on the list with a £20.6bn fortune.
Third place goes to property magnates David and Simon Reuben with £15bn, followed by steel industrialist Lakshmi Mittal with £14.7bn.
Ratcliffe is joined in the top 20 by his top lieutenants at Ineos John Reece and Andy Currie, who have enjoyed fabulous wealth from their stakes in the firm. Reece and Currie both own 20% stakes in the company – valued at £7bn apiece.
Ineos, which is trying to frack for shale gas in south Yorkshire, owns an eclectic portfolio of assets including the Swiss football club Lausanne-Sport, the luxury jacket maker Belstaff and has announced plans to build a successor to the Land Rover Defender.
Ratcliffe, a Brexit supporter, this week told the British Olympic Association to “take a long walk off a short plank” after it refused to let him use its Team GB trademark for his America’s Cup team without paying. Ratcliffe struck a £110m deal last month to underwrite Sir Ben Ainslie’s team for the yachting race, to be held in Auckland in 2021, and rebranded it “Ineos Team GB”, but the BOA refused him the rights without a $9m (£6.6m) contribution to help fund Olympians. Instead, he rebranded it again as Ineos Team UK.
