Soros to give £14bn fortune to charity

INVESTOR George Soros – dubbed ‘the man who broke the Bank of England’ by betting against the pound – has donated £13.7bn to his charitable foundation.

The 87-year-old Hungarian-American has given the money to the Open Society Foundations, an organisation he set up in 1979 to support democracy and human rights around the world.

The move takes his lifetime giving to £24.3bn and makes it the third largest charitable organisation in the world behind the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust.

The latest donation represents the bulk of Soros’s estimated fortune of £17.4bn.

Soros earned global renown after he made huge profits betting against the pound when Britain crashed out of the exchange rate mechanism in 1992.

The Open Society Foundations has spent around £10.5bn in nearly four decades, running programmes that support women’s rights, immigrants, drug addicts and young parents.