THE WIDER ANGLE. Why London is a hub for the super-rich

He’s known online as DanTDM and he’s a British YouTube personality, gamer and author. But 28-year-old Dan Middleton, who makes videos of himself playing video games like Minecraft, is also worth £25 million. His YouTube videos, which attract scores of advertisers, have been watched some 14 billion times and he receives pay-cheques of around £800,000 every month from YouTube. Not bad for a young man who was stacking shelves at Tesco just six years ago.

The Sunday Times Rich List 2019, released last weekend, vividly shows how the ways to amass wealth have altered radically in the 21st century. Once wealth charts were topped by steel, oil, coal and railway barons, textile manufacturers and self-made men — yes, they were virtually all men — who built smokestack factories or alternatively by landed gentry who owned thousands of acres of rolling countryside.

Today, the roll-calls of the rich are sprinkled with entrepreneurs like Kelly Choi, a South Korean, who with her husband, Jerome Castaing, have opened 700 sushi bars around Europe from their London base. Choi, known as the sushi queen, and her husband are worth £307 million, up by £90 million from last year.

Running sushi bars might seem like too much hard work for those who don’t care for slaving in the kitchen. But even intellectual pursuits can lead to great riches in our modern world. Take Joanne (JK) Rowling, who’s worth £750 million with royalties from Harry Potter movies, her detective Cormoran Strike and even a super-hit Broadway play. Ahead of her is Sir Andrew Lloyd-Webber, whose catchy-tunes musicals have earned him £820 million.

And the bad boy of British art, Damien Hirst, is worth £315 million. The artist-provocateur is famous for his sharks and sheep suspended in formaldehyde. And Harry Potter himself, or rather actor Daniel Radcliffe, is worth £90 million from his hard-working teenage years as a wizard.

Working his way to the centre of the books world is Cardiff-born Sir Michael Moritz and his author wife Harriet Heyman. Moritz ran venture-capital giant Sequoia Capital and he presciently backed Internet stars like LinkedIn, Yahoo, Paypal and even China’s Alibaba.

Most recently, Moritz and his wife, both big readers, backed the Booker Prize for the next five years. At £3 billion, he’s reckoned to be the world’s richest Welshman.

The rich list

Even though Britain is tearing itself to shreds over Brexit, amidst the chaos, London is still the global city that’s second-to-none in one way: it’s the metropolis with the world’s greatest congregation of billionaires. The Rich List estimates 95 billionaires live in what was once the First City of the British Empire.

That compares to 73 in San Francisco, whose wealth streams are fed by Silicon Valley, and 71 in New York. It should be mentioned San Francisco’s 73 billionaires eclipse London’s in one way — they’re worth £403 billion compared to London’s 95 who’re worth £379 billion.

It goes without saying these billionaires aren’t all native-born English waving the flag of St George at football matches. They’ve arrived in London from all corners of the globe — and the top two names on the list have strong links with Mumbai. The Hinduja brothers with their base at New Zealand House near Trafalgar Square have been at the top, or near the top, of the Rich List for well over two decades. This time, the four brothers are reckoned to be worth £22 billion with a sprawling business empire divided between India, Britain and other parts of the world.

The Bombay connection is more distant for Simon and David Reuben, sons of Baghdadi Jews who were born in Mumbai and who left for Britain as teenagers in the mid-1950s. The Reuben brothers, who’ve ascended to second spot, made their money in metals, striking it rich in the Wild West business world of 1990s Russia.

They liquidated their Russian holdings at the right time and shovelled funds into profitable investments like London’s property market. In London, they own scores of properties including Millbank Tower, down the road from the Houses of Parliament.

They also recently got planning permission for a new 42-storey high-rise tower already been nicknamed The Cucumber for reasons not hard to fathom. Last month, they bought 100 Pall Mall in the historic St James area for £90 million. The Reuben brothers are betting London will still be a bustling global capital even if Brexit goes through.

They are worth £18.66 billion. The Reubens also smartly jumped on the hi-tech bandwagon back in 1998, opening data centres around Europe offering tech infrastructure for organisations.

Then, there are people like Denise Coates who turned her family’s betting shop chain into a gaming empire worth £6.8 billion. Or, look at London-based Russian Andrey Andreev who has made £1.5 billion from Badoo and a handful of other dating apps. Offering technology in a different way is inventor-industrialist Sir James Dyson, most famous for his eponymously named vacuum cleaner. He’s worth £12.6 billion.

However, there’s nothing New Age about Lakshmi Mittal’s Arcelor Mittal and perhaps that’s why he has slipped down the wealth charts. The Man with the Midas Touch, who gave steel a golden sheen, has topped the list several times but this time he only makes it to 11th spot as falling steel prices have gouged his company’s wealth.

It’s reckoned Mittal lost £11 million daily last year which means he’s worth a relatively modest £10.66 billion. Just behind him in 12th place is Vedanta’s Anil Agarwal who checks in at £10.57 billion. Lord Swraj Paul, who’s been a constant on TheSunday Times Rich Lists since they first appeared, is now worth £2 billion.

Asian presence

For the last 25 years, Asian millionaires and billionaires have been conspicuous for their wealth on The Sunday Times Rich List, which has 1,000 names. This time around, there are about 70 super-rich Asians of Indian origin who make it to the list.

Many have built strong positions in the worlds of retailing and hoteliering. Others, who started modestly as employees behind the counter, have pharmaceutical chain empires.

It appears Britain, and particularly London, has built itself into a great place for the world’s wealthy to congregate. Partly this has to do with the English language, but also with a benign tax system and the city’s battalions of top-class lawyers and chartered accountants who’re skilled at handling the mega-problems of being very rich.

No surprise then that several Russian billionaires like Roman Abramovich and Alisher Usmanov have made their homes there. And so, while the sun may have set on the British Empire, it’s still a country with rich attractions.

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