TOM CROTTY dropped into his seat as if weighed down by the bags under his eyes. Last Monday the director of Ineos had been up since 5 am, attempting to avert a strike at his Grangemouth refinery, the threat of which was already causing panic buying at petrol stations across Scotland.

“I wouldn’t normally wear a tie,” said Crotty, in his shabby office at the group’s chlorine and PVC plant in Runcorn, Cheshire. “But I thought I’d better when I found out they wanted to interview me on television.”

He had to do a lot of that last week as talks with the unions collapsed and the refinery was shut down in preparation for the strike.

Nobody at Ineos is accustomed to the limelight. It is a company that specialises in being quietly unfashionable, yet incredibly successful.

Jim Ratcliffe, the founder and chairman of Ineos, is confirmed in today’s Sunday Times Rich List as one of Britain’s richest men, ranked No 25 with a personal fortune of £2.3 billion.

Armed to the teeth with debt, Ratcliffe embarked on a 10-year spree of deals that has transformed his start-up business into the world’s third-largest chemicals company, trailing only Germany’s BASF and Dow Chemical of America. With sales of almost $46 billion (£23.3 billion), it is also Britain’s biggest private company.

Ratcliffe and his key lieutenants have bought the businesses dismissed as “non-core” by the likes of BP in the case of Grangemouth, or ICI at Runcorn. Stitching the cast-offs together has allowed him to create a new British industrial powerhouse.

“In a number of cases we have put things back together that were broken up by the same company,” said Crotty. “That’s what happened at Runcorn. ICI owned the whole site, then sold part of it to a joint venture. Now we have bought all the constituent parts and are running it as a whole again.”

Ineos loves boring companies. None of its products goes directly to consumers — it makes the plastics that its customers then turn into everything from window frames and light switches to computers and car interiors.

Some of its products are of critical importance to the economy — if the Runcorn chlorine plant went down, Britain would run out of drinking water in three days.

“We like commodity businesses,” said Crotty. “That’s the attraction for Ineos. We know you can make a good living out of commodity chemicals.

“A lot of blue-chip companies and plcs find those businesses difficult to manage. They are cyclical — but we are prepared to take a six, seven or eight-year view. We don’t have to worry about quarterly performance, or shareholders.”