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For Britain’s super-rich, life just gets better and better. Booming stock markets, soaring property prices, mega takeover deals and the City awash with big bonuses have led to a wealth explosion. As a result, the combined wealth of the top 1,000 listed in The Sunday Times Rich List has soared by more than £50 billion in a single year to £300.964 billion.
This represents a near 20.6% increase on last year and is one of the highest rises in a year we have recorded since our first list in 1989.
Nine years ago when Tony Blair came to power, the wealth of the then 1,000 stood at £98.99 billion. The rich have got much richer under Labour than ever they did in percentage terms under a Tory government. In the past six years alone, the wealth of our top 1,000 has rocketed from the £115 billion we recorded in 2000. Our top 10 this year are worth £59.5 billion in total, nearly £4 billion more than the top 200 were collectively worth in 1996. Our numbers one and two are still steel baron Lakshmi Mittal, at a virtually unchanged £14.8 billion, and Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea football club, who has leapt to £10.8 billion on the back of surging oil prices. Abramovich’s annual investment income alone should easily cover the £440m he has ploughed into building Chelsea as a force in Premiership and European football.
Our multimillionaires are not alone in experiencing a wealth explosion. The richest 50 in Europe have increased their wealth over the past year by an even greater 32.9%, taking their total to £323.1 billion while the world’s top 50 have also achieved a healthy 23.3% increase, and at £564.3 billion, their wealth dwarfs that of the British rich.
The British wealth explosion is reflected in the record number of billionaires in the list. At 54, it is 14 higher than last year. In 1997, there were just 16. Of the 54 British billionaires, 20 have come to live in Britain from overseas. Indian, Russian, Scandinavian and Icelandic multimillionaires have usually made a beeline for the London area. The number of multimillionaires in the southeast accounts for more than 52% of our total 1,000, the highest percentage we have recorded.
Record activity in the City has played a part in the rise of London, pushing up fabled bonuses and banking profits. An exhaustive search of the former partners of Goldman Sachs who became multimillionaires, courtesy of its 1999 flotation, has thrown up a record 15 this year. Another six hedge-fund managers trained at Goldman but made their fortunes elsewhere. The sharp rise in hedge fund activity has also helped to cement fortunes there; we have 43 hedge fund stars in the list out of a record 152 in the financial services sector as a whole. But it is a pressurised life. One of the star fund managers, David Beach, will now be able to spend some of his £90m fortune having decided to pack it in after 17 years trading with a week that ran from late on Sunday night to late on Friday as he traded in more than 90 markets from New Zealand to America’s West Coast.
There are another 72 multimillionaires mainly based in tax havens such as the Channel Isles, Monaco and the Isle of Man. Our Monaco contingent has now reached 13, headed by Philip and Tina Green at £4.9 billion. A new overseas territory has been added to our coverage in the shape of Gibraltar. The rise of internet poker gambling sites and their subsequent flotations on the London stock market has created huge fortunes for the founders. Russell De Leon and his wife Ruth Parasol are doyens of the new industry as co-founders of Party Gaming. The low-key couple are now worth £2.016 billion.
Property has proved to be a profitable investment in recent times, protecting against the vicissitudes of markets. It is no coincidence that this year there are 211 whose wealth derives from property or land ownership (up from 198 a year ago). Again this is a record figure, helped by booming industrial and commercial property prices. The property tycoons are led by the Duke of Westminster, the richest British-born person in the list who comes in at No 3 with a £6.6 billion fortune.
Industrial fortunes continue to disappear, albeit at a slower pace. Two years ago we had 120 industrialists in the list, last year it fell to 107 but this year it is only down one at 106. The make-up of these 106 is instructive of how British industry is faring. There are few owners of industrial combines with large plants based in Britain. Mittal may be the global supremo in steel but he has no manufacturing plants here. One exception is James Ratcliffe, who has built Ineos Group into a huge specialist chemicals operation by buying up unwanted subsidiaries of large chemical and oil majors. Worth £1,100m, he has been described as the chemical industry’s answer to Mittal.
Regional industrial fortunes are thriving even if the numbers may be declining. Leeds-based Jimmy Heselden, the former miner who made his debut in the list last year, has risen to £160m on the back of sharply increased profits from supplying the Pentagon with a 21st-century version of the humble sandbag for its troops in Iraq. In Essex, Larry Albon has built his business and a £60m fortune by supplying precision components for the automotive industry, thus defying the doom-mongers who predicted the death of the British automotive sector with Rover’s demise.
The wealth surge has meant we have raised our threshold for entry to the top 1,000 to £60m, another record, and £10m more than last year. In our first list in 1989, a £60m fortune would have meant entry to the top 100 of the 200 we then recorded. In 2006 it takes £605m — more than 10 times that figure — to get into the top 100. Raising our bottom line keeps former Rich L ist members such as Roger Taylor, the Queen drummer, and Meena Pathak, the curry queen, on the sidelines.
For the fourth year in a row, the number of Scots in the top 1,000 has fallen, this time from 69 to 61. Here we have a new No 1 in the shape of Sir Tom Hunter at £780m. Hunter is making waves in the charitable sector with his efforts to make his fellow multimillionaires open their wallets for good causes. He replaces Paul Fentener van Vlissingen, who returned to his native Holland earlier this year due to ill-health. Despite the fewer Scots in the top 1,000, the overall wealth of our top 100 Scots, on pages 84-85, has risen sharply by about £1.2 billion to nearly £14.5 billion. The 24 in the top 1,000 from Wales or Welsh-born (see page 85) is up slightly on last year’s 21, though the overall wealth figure is down at £5.6 billion, largely because we have downgraded Michael Moritz, the Cardiff-born backer of the Google search engine. He is replaced as our new Welsh No 1 by Sir Terry Matthews, the electronics tycoon.
