Billionaire’s £50,000 gift to ‘rebels’

ONE of the UK’s richest men has given £50,000 to Extinction Rebellion, it was revealed last night.

Sir Christopher Hohn, a hedge fund manager worth £1.2billion, said he donated the money because ‘humanity is aggressively destroying the world’.

A charity he co-founded, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, is thought to have given a further £150,000 to the climate change group.

Sir Christopher told The Daily Telegraph: ‘I am a personal funder of Extinction Rebellion. I recently gave them £ 50,000 because humanity is aggressively destroying the world with climate change and there is an urgent need for us all to wake up to this fact.’

The billionaire was last year paid a £215million dividend from his hedge fund – the Children’s Investment Fund.

The fund used to own a 2 per cent stake in Coal India, a state-backed company based in Kolkata, which it sold in 2014.

Sir Christopher’s 2013 divorce was, at the time, the largest settlement ever awarded by an English court, with the financier being ordered to pay his ex-wife Jamie Cooper more than £337million.

Extinction Rebellion, which has raised £2.5million since it was launched last year, has also been backed by the Climate Emergency Fund and US philanthropists, including oil heiress Aileen Getty.

Andrew Medway, a former bank trader who organises Extinction Rebellion’s funding, said more than 6,000 people have donated more than £600,000 this week.