JOSEPH LEWIS, one of the world’s richest men, has always liked a flutter. He has been known to wager £30,000 on a hole of golf. But in his earlier days, he treated betting on the horses as seriously as any business deal he has ever made. Gambling on the sport of kings was about making money first and enjoying the racing second.

It seems not much has changed. The UK’s 16th-richest man, worth some £2.8 billion, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, has again taken to the world of betting in the hope of extending his already huge wealth. Last week it was revealed that he had a stake of almost 7%, worth about £133m, in Ladbrokes, Britain’s biggest bookmaker.

Lewis, 71, has been quietly amassing his stake in the company over the past few weeks, using Citigroup, the investment bank, to scoop up the shares on his behalf, which he holds through contracts for difference, a form of derivative that allows investors to own shares without disclosing their identities.

That would suit the ultra-secretive tycoon, who quit Britain in 1979 for the Bahamas before eventually settling in Florida. It is not clear what intentions Lewis, who shuns almost all interview requests, has towards Ladbrokes.

But by accumulating such a big holding, Lewis joins several other members of the super-rich who have gone long on Britain’s biggest companies.

The Barclay twins, owners of The Ritz, have about 10% of InterContinental Hotels Group; Robert Tchenguiz, the property investor, holds big stakes in J Sainsbury, the supermarket, and in Mitchells & Butlers, the pub operator; and sports retail billionaire Mike Ashley has recently picked up a stake in Shaftesbury, the property company that owns big tracts of London’s Covent Garden and China-town districts.

Lewis has a reputation for taking big positions in quoted companies; he is sitting on a recently acquired stake in Bear Stearns, the investment bank, and in the past made a handsome profit from the sale of a 29% stake in Christie’s, the auction house, to French luxury-goods billionaire François Pinault.

He is not averse to launching hostile takeover moves. The sale of the Christie’s stake only came about after his attempts to buy the business outright fell through.

A bid for Ladbrokes, then, is not out of the question, and Lewis is known to be close to at least two other big Ladbrokes shareholders, John Magnier and JP McManus, the racing tycoons who are thought to hold a little under 3% of the company. Between them, the three would certainly have the firepower to fund such a move.

The timing of Lewis’s share purchases in Britain’s largest bookie looks characteristically shrewd. Citi disclosed its initial purchase on February 1 when Ladbrokes’ stock was not far off its 52-week low of 253½p.

The bookmaker is as much in the dark about Lewis’s intentions as is the rest of the market. The company has not even been able to confirm formally yet that the British billionaire and golf fanatic is behind the stakebuilding, although it is working hard to do so. There have been rumours that somebody may be picking up stock in the past month, and the price has risen by 14%, closing at 307½p last Friday. That values Ladbrokes at £1.9 billion.

It is not the first time Lewis has looked at buying a bookmaking business. Enic, an investment company in which his family has a 70% interest and which is best known for being the largest shareholder in Tottenham Hotspur football club, once tried to acquire Victor Chandler, the Gibraltar-based bookie, although a deal was never struck. Chandler joined another high-profile target, Wembley Stadium, on a short list of near-misses that Enic had tried to buy.

The leisure sector has always been in Lewis’s blood. He was born in February 1937 above his parents’ pub, The Roman Arms, in Bow in the heart of London’s East End.

The pub was destroyed during the Blitz but, after returning from fighting during the second world war, Lewis’s father, Charles, opened a café with his wife, Gladys.

Joseph went to work at the café after leaving school when he was 15, and Charles instilled in him the importance of making one’s own way financially. Lewis’s business brain was in evidence even in those early days and he helped his parents build a catering empire.

An early acquisition was the Tavistock Banqueting Rooms, a haunt favoured by the stars of the day. Another was the Han-over Grand, where The Beatles chose to launch one of their singles and which became popular with tourists.

Lewis quickly cottoned on to what overseas visitors enjoyed, a knowledge that laid the foundations for his later successes. Initially, he sensed the opportunity to run themed restaurants that offered a British experience.

One, near the Tower of London, was named Beefeater and offered medieval banquets; another, the Caledonian, had a Scottish theme.

Later, Lewis moved into retail, opening shops selling cashmere clothes to Japanese tourists. In each shop he installed a bureau de change, allowing him to profit from fashion and, for the first but certainly not the last time in his career, from currency exchange.

He had long had an interest in trading shares, but it was betting on the foreign-exchange markets that proved transforma-tional for Lewis. Having tired of Britain in 1979, he set up shop in the Bahamas, and it was here he turned a multi-million-pound fortune into one worth billions.

The deal for which Lewis is perhaps best known came in 1992 when he placed large bets that the value of the pound would fall, moves similar to those made by George Soros that helped to spark Black Wednesday, the day Britain was forced to withdraw from the European exchange-rate mechanism. Lewis is said to have profited to the tune of several hundred million pounds from sterling’s collapse.

He achieved a similar result less than three years later, after forecasting a precipitous fall in the value of the Mexican peso.

These days Lewis’s business activities extend much further than currency movements. His main investment vehicle, Tavistock Group – named after the banqueting hall he had bought in the 1960s – has interests in more than 170 companies in 15 countries. These span Florida restaurants, Argentinian ice-cream parlours, footwear, life sciences and property.

But don’t bet against British bookmaking becoming an even more significant outpost in his business empire.

STORY SO FAR

Founded: 1886 in the village of Ladbroke, Warwickshire

Floated: 1967

Ladbrokes.com launched: 2000

Market value: £1.9 billion

Number of high-street betting shops: 2,583

Number of bets placed in its betting shops per year: 350m

Annual gross win: £1.01 billion

Annual pretax profit: £669.8m

Staff: 14,000

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