Big Shot of the week
JIM RATCLIFFE, 64 CHAIRMAN AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE, INEOS
HE IS Britain’s most successful post-war industrialist, with a privately owned petrochemicals firm which employs some 17,000 people and boasts an annual turnover of around £35bn.
His £3.3bn fortune puts him in the same big leagues as publicity-prone knights of the realm Branson, Dyson and Green.
He’s so loaded he could afford to lose a coin flip with the ubiquitous Lord (Alan) Sugar over the size of their respective bank balances, and still have enough spare change to buy a private Caribbean hideaway.
Not that you would necessarily think this to look at him.
Tall, gangly, with endearingly unkempt hair, he looks more like a zany science professor than a braces-tugging plutocrat.
So it was understandable this week when Ineos boss Jim Ratcliffe announced to great fanfare that he planned to launch his own rugged off-road car in the style of Land Rover’s discontinued Defender, most people’s reaction was: Who?
A shy, slightly awkward figure with little thirst for public affection, Ratcliffe, 64, is the British tycoon you haven’t heard of. He is the reverse Dyson. The anti-Branson.
There is no knighthood to boast of, no eponymous charitable foundation set up in his honour nor even as much as a self-laudatory entry in Who’s Who to peruse.
BORN in Manchester to working class stock, he claims to have learned to count from totting up the chimney pots along the cul-de-sac from his council house.
His father was a no-nonsense joiner who instilled a hard-working ethic in Jim and his brother Bob from an early age.
While working at his father’s factory as a teenager, Bob recalls his old man refusing to give him a lift to work, even in the pouring rain. ‘The lad’s not made of sugar,’ Ratcliffe Snr told his colleagues. ‘He won’t bloody melt.’
After graduating from Birmingham University, problems with eczema kept Jim from pursuing a career in chemical engineering. Instead, he joined US private equity firm Advent International, honing his deal-making skills before branching off, in 1998 at the age of 40, into entrepreneurship to set up Ineos.
His plan was relatively simple. Snap up unloved, undermanaged commodity businesses from chemical giants such as ICI and BP, using leveraged finance, and then look to turn them around and double their cash flow within five years.
After ten years, the company made more than 20 acquisitions and Ratcliffe found himself a fully-fledged billionaire.
Such a condensed history of his success doesn’t even begin to do justice to the immense risks he has taken along the way.
Just setting up Ineos required remortgaging his house and putting everything he had on the table.
But thrill-seeking and adrenaline are part of Ratcliffe’s lifeblood. He is a fan of extreme sports, and regularly takes part in marathons and other madcap wheezes aimed at pushing his body to the limits.
He has been to both North and South Poles, taking his two grown up sons, Sam and George, with him, and once embarked on a motorbike trip across Africa with three broken bones in his foot.
When it comes to negotiations, he’s been more than happy to make enemies along the way.
His stand-off with workers at Grangemouth power plant, which he bought in 2005 as part of a £5bn deal for BP’s refining and petrochemical arm Innovene, was one of the most bruising industrial disputes of modern times.
During the height of the complicated squabble in 2013, during which Ratcliffe came within a whisker of shutting the plant, the Unite union dubbed him ‘Dr No’ due to his stubborn refusal to compromise over workers’ pensions.
In the cut-throat world of business, Bond villain analogies are somewhat overcooked.
But in this case, Ratcliffe had given the frothy-mouthed brothers a fair amount of ammo.
At the time, he was in self-imposed exile in tax-friendly Switzerland (he and second wife Alicia have since returned to London and live in Chelsea), had a 235ft yacht circling the Mediterranean and had just submitted plans to build a looming, £4m house on stilts in the New Forest visible only from sailing boats bobbing on the Solent.
Staff at his new offices in Knightsbridge paint a more generous picture of his character. They describe Ratcliffe as a good people manager who encourages them to take equity in the businesses they work in. The atmosphere at work is said to be relaxed and unstuffy.
Socially, he keeps a small coterie of loyal friends, who say he enjoys nothing more than helping them achieve things, be it professionally or convincing them to join him on one of his adventures.
The truth is, whether it’s employees, friends or money-lenders, the man they like to call Dr No has always been rather good at getting people to say yes.