Ineos boss buys safari park

CHEMICALS billionaire Jim Ratcliffe is splashing out on yet more wild investments.

The Ineos founder, 65, has just bought a football team and leather jacket maker – and plans to start making cars.

Ratcliffe ( pictured) is also teaming up with a safari company backed by Norway’s sovereign wealth fund on a £7.5m safari project in Tanzania. Ratcliffe says the project with Asilia Africa, which includes three luxury lodges, will boost tourism, create jobs and discourage poaching.

Ratcliffe, who has travelled widely in the area, said: ‘The creation of a sustainable and ecologically friendly safari tourism business will both protect the wildlife and help the people of this amazing region.’

It comes as his firm is battling to fix an oil pipe that carries about 40pc of North Sea oil and gas to the UK mainland.

Oil prices reached two-year highs when the crack in the Forties Pipeline System was discovered last week. Ineos is better known for producing industrial chemicals and oil and wanting to start a fracking revolution in the UK. But earlier this year it announced plans to build a successor to the Land Rover Defender. Then it bought motorbike jacket maker Belstaff and Lausanne Football Club. The safari investment is from Ratcliffe’s personal cash rather than the firm’s. It is not clear how much he is investing.