Surrey Life Rich List 2007
For the first time ever, Surrey Life can bring you the definitive guide wealthiest Surrey residents – who they are and how they made their fortune. Compiled by Sunday Times journalist Philip Beresford
With grateful thanks to our sponsor Sunseeker London
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Surrey Life Rich List 2007
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SURREY’S millionaires have never had it so good. The county may be the most wooded in Britain, but its rolling downlands, genteel towns and proximity to the City of London mean that millionaires seem to be ten-a-penny in a population of 1.07m. Certainly, in producing this, the first ever Surrey Life Rich List, we have been able to find over £9.1 billion of wealth in the hands of 50 people or families in what we count as Surrey – stretching from Kingston, Richmond, Wimbledon, Sutton and Croydon in the north by way of the borders of Kent, Sussex, Hampshire and Berkshire in other directions.
The Surrey Life Rich List is headed by Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi-born British citizen who lives in some style in Kingston-on- Thames, complete with a £2.57 billion fortune. He has huge property and hotel interests in the Middle East and fell out with the late Saddam Hussein. But Kingston is very much Auchi’s home despite his frequent trips to his luxury hotels and the like scattered through the Arab and North African states.
In all, eighteen have made their fortunes in property or housebuilding. This will not surprise any of our readers who know that local house prices are sky high, only surpassed by certain choice areas of London. The fact that the county is so wooded (22.4% of the surface against a national average of 11.8%), plus the vast tracts of protected green belt, all put a premium on land prices for development and help fuel the wealth of developers and property traders.
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Outside of property, there is a pretty broad spread of other business areas for our Surrey Life rich 50, though we do have several rock stars. Richmond has two in the shape of Sir Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood of the Stones. Others in the county include Brian May, guitarist with Queen, the evergreen Sir Cliff Richard and old ‘slowhand’ himself, aka Eric Clapton, who lives quietly in the Surrey Hills.
But while the celebrity count is up on the music side, football money is absent. As Surrey does not possess a Premiership team or indeed one in the Championship, there are no millionaire owners of top flight teams locally. Roman Abramovich has a house just in Sussex so he does not qualify. The nearest we have in Surrey is Chris Ingram, the £60m owner of Woking Town. On the playing front, while many Chelsea players, such as John Terry or Claude Makelele, live in Surrey to be near their Cobham training ground, the fact is they are simply not rich enough to reach our £30m cutoff for this list. Even on £150,000 a week (Terry’s rumoured weekly salary package in his contract being negotiated), a footballer is “only” making £7.8m a year. If he gets another £2m or so from endorsements, it will take him four years aftertax and spending to approach our bottom line. Even then, it requires him to live fairly frugally and not indulge in a life of high spending, a temptation that many a young footballer can’t resist.
But this is a very meritocratic list nonetheless. There are no aristocrats of the old school as Surrey does not have a tradition of great landed families. Of our 50, only six actually inherited their wealth, so this is a list of Surrey’s self-made tycoons. It is also a male list. There are only four women in the Surrey Life Rich List and most are in by virtue of being in with their husbands or as a family entry. It’s also a pretty middleaged list too. The youngest is just 40 while the oldest is 84. There are no young entrepreneurs or sports stars here. Pop and film stars, too, are notable by their absence.
The wealth of our Surrey Life rich 50 is also spread out around the county; there is no one hotspot. Almost every town or district in Surrey seems to have a few, be it Guildford, Woking, Egham, Richmond etc, which can only be healthy for continued prosperity.
But to qualify someone for the Surrey Life Rich 50 is no simple matter. The 50 must either work, live or have a substantial presence in the area. Their wealth is assessed on land holdings, shares in quoted or private companies and any proceeds from company sales. Quoted company stakes were valued in February 2007. Private companies are generally valued at about eight to 10 times their latest profit figures depending on the financial health of the operation. We have no access to detailed personal financial records, such as bank
accounts or the like, and make no allowance for these.
So read on...