THE BILLIONAIR£S’ CLUB
HOW ENTREPRENEURS MADE THEIR WEALTH – AND HOW THEY’RE SPENDING IT
ALASTAIR SALVESEN
THE Salvesen family came to Grangemouth, Stirlingshire, from Norway in the 1840s and began brokering cargo from the port.
They expanded into Leith, built ships, traded with Scandinavia and the Baltics. By the 1950s they were pulling out of whaling in favour of haulage, distribution, equipment hire and food processing.
The company founded and named by Christian Salvesen are now a wholly owned subsidiary of the French transport group Norbert Dentressangle. Alastair Salvesen – one of Christian’s great grandchildren – retains a £17million stake.
He is chairman of Dawnfresh Seafoods, president of the Royal Highlands and Agricultural Society of Scotland and has a portfolio of smaller business interests.
A keen supporter of the arts, he stepped in to save Edinburgh Dovecot Studio when they faced closure. He is now one of their directors.
He donated £5million to found The Salvesen Mindroom Centre, who research why some children have difficulty learning, at Edinburgh University. He lives in Pathhead, Midlothian, with his wife Elizabeth.
IAN WOOD
DESPITE being “retired”, 74-year-old Ian Wood is as busy as ever. Having transformed his Aberdeen-based family fishing business into oil service giants Wood Group, he is now busy giving away most of his £2.15billion fortune.
He joined the firm in 1962, was CEO by 1967 and stayed at the helm for nearly five decades. They were listed on the stock exchange in 2002, expanding into alternative energy technology as well as traditional fossil fuels. He stayed on as chairman before retiring in 2012.
Possibly with an eye to the decline of Scotland’s oil reserves – he thinks they are running out – Wood has invested in other sectors. Keen that his home city should not be left behind, he set up Opportunity North East to help Aberdeen’s oil-dependent economy to diversify.
His charity, the Wood Foundation, work with farmers in Africa and young people in Scotland.
Having experienced the stress of trying to park at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, he donated £10million to build a car park.
He lives in Aberdeen with his wife Helen.
TOM HUNTER
PHILANTHROPY and investments have seen Ayrshire-born Tom Hunter, 55, fall in and out of billionaire status, although his net worth is currently calculated at £1.1billion.
He has given away huge chunks of his retail-based fortune – Band Aid, Comic Relief and Bill Clinton’s foundation in Africa have all had seven-figure donations.
He also takes business education extremely seriously, endowing the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of Strathclyde and Entrepreneurial Spark in Ayrshire.
But he also lost a good chunk of his cash in the financial crisis, reckoning he emerged from 2008-9 £250million down.
Hunter’s careers officer in New Cumnock advised him to go down the pit but he helped out in his dad’s grocer’s shop. In 1984, he started out selling trainers from the back of a van. By 1998, he had built Sports Division, then sold the firm to JJB Sports for £290million.
Since then, he has diversified into fund management and investment. He has also pledged to give away £1billion in his lifetime.
JK ROWLING
THE Harry Potter author swithers between millionaire and billionaire status. Not because the 51-year-old buys too many racehorses and yachts but because she gives so much of her cash away.
Last December, she dropped off American magazine Forbes’ billionaires’ list, with UK taxes and charitable donations blamed.
Last year, she gave £10.3million to her charity Lumos, who aim to get children out of orphanages in eastern Europe and to further multiple sclerosis research. Her mother had MS and Rowling has founded a clinic at Edinburgh University in her name.
Rowling’s fortune did not come easily. As a single parent, she pushed her baby to cafes and stretched one coffee over hours as she wrote her first book. When her daughter needed a nappy change, she popped into a branch of Boots that had free nappies in the toilets.
The bulk of her wealth has come from the books, reckoned to have made her £900million. Film rights, licensing and and Harry Potter theme parks are also lucrative.
With her west end stage production, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, winning nine Olivier awards this week, the Edinburghbased author is unlikely to be off the Forbes’ list for long. JIM MCCOLL AN ENGINEER-turned-entrepreneur, 65-year-old Jim McColl made his fortune in 1992 when he bought a 29.9 per cent stake in the ailing family-owned Clyde Blowers for £1million. He took them off the London Stock Exchange, increased his holding to 70 per cent and systematically bought up the competition. By 2007, Clyde Blowers were in a position to buy the Weir Group – where McColl had worked as an apprentice when he left school at 16.
The company are now known as Clyde Blowers Capital. An industrial investment firm, they are based in McColl’s hometown of East Kilbride. They build on their founders’ speciality, investing in mid-sized engineering firms and growing them into market leaders.
McColl and his wife Shona are based in Monaco, although they do have a place outside Glasgow.
BRIAN SOUTER & ANN GLOAG
SIR Brian Souter and his big sister Ann Gloag made their fortune from deregulated transport.
Spotting a gap in the market for cheap inter-city bus travel, they used their father’s redundancy money to start Stagecoach in 1980.
Company president Souter, 61, has overseen the firm’s expansion as they went on to found Megabus and the English rail franchise South West Trains. Another of their firms, Highland Global Transport, operate in Finland, the Baltic states and Turkey. They also have a subsidiary company in New Zealand.
Souter, a vocal SNP supporter, backed the campaign to keep Section 2A that prevented local authorities from “promoting” homosexuality. The Souter Charitable Trust, set up in 1992, support mainly Christian charities in the UK and Africa.
Gloag, 74, who, like her brother, lives in Perthshire, runs the Gloag Foundation, who operate the Kenya Children’s Home charity, the Balcraig Foundationn charity and the Freedom from Fistula Foundation.