He’s a council house success story ... but Sir Jim’s put profits before his principles
WHAT a vast gulf there is between Britain’s richest man, the chemicals mogul Sir Jim Ratcliffe, and Bill Gates, the world’s greatest philanthropist.
When I interviewed Gates last week, he confided that he had paid $10billion in tax since he founded software giant Microsoft in the mid-1970s, but that he did not think even that vast sum was enough to fulfil his responsibilities to society.
Contrast that attitude, the maturity and modesty shown by a titan like Gates, with Ratcliffe’s tawdry plans to deprive the UK Treasury of huge sums in tax by moving to Monaco.
There, of course, his neighbours will include luminaries such as Sir Philip Green and his wife Lady Tina. She notoriously took a £1.2billion dividend completely free of tax from her husband’s fashion empire in 2005, thanks to her residence in the principality which was famously described by novelist Somerset Maugham as a ‘ sunny place for shady people’.
What a way for Sir Jim, the founder of Ineos, a multi-national chemicals company and a vocal Brexiteer, to behave towards Britain as it hurtles towards life outside the European Union. He is following in the footsteps of fellow Brexiteer billionaire Sir James Dyson, who recently announced that he, too, is jumping ship by moving his company headquarters to Singapore.
Unlike the majority of Britons, the two businessmen have the luxury of spouting their pro-Brexit opinions safe in the knowledge they are insulated from any of the consequences by their vast wealth. They can hedge their bets and cut their tax bills by shunting their assets – or themselves – offshore.
And what a way for Ratcliffe to repay the honour of the knighthood bestowed on him by the Queen only last summer for services to business and investment. But in his mindset, patriotism and principle come a long way behind profit and personal enrichment.
All of this is a terrible shame because there is much to admire about the 66year-old tycoon.
He is the first UK-born industrialist ever to top the Sunday Times Rich List,
which he did last year with a fortune of £21billion. In fairness to Ratcliffe, he also appeared in that newspaper’s list of the UK’s biggest taxpayers for 2018 when he paid £110million.
Ineos, the business which he created from scratch, is Britain’s biggest private company with a turnover of nearly £47billion and 19,000 employees in 24 countries. That’s a success in any estimation.
THEson of a joiner and an office clerical worker, he is living proof of how far determination, energy and hard work can take an entrepreneur. He is often described as selfmade
which is true – but he was in fact made in Britain – with the help of this country’s tax and social system. It was the public purse that paid for the council house, on Dunkerley Avenue in Failsworth near Oldham, where he spent his early years. Public money also financed the grammar school he attended, and his chemical engineering degree at Birmingham University in the days before student fees and loans.
He was part of a post-war generation for whom dramatic social mobility was possible, thanks to taxpayer-funded housing and education.
Now surely is his chance to acknowledge that, by paying taxes here with good grace. Instead, he is skulking off to
Monaco. Unlike Gates, who acknowledges he does not ‘deserve’ his great wealth, it came through ‘timing, luck and people I work with’, Ratcliffe shows no trace of humility.
The move looks like pure selfinterest, and for what? He hardly needs the money: his wealth last year increased by an estimated £42million a day. He already has a superyacht, a grand home in Chelsea and an estate in Iceland, among many other assets.
And he has more than enough to fritter on a partnership with Olympic sailor Sir Ben Ainslie to compete for the America’s Cup in 2021, on which he is reported to have spent £110million.
Surely there are only so many vanity projects, toys and baubles any man could want.
Sir Jim is a brilliant entrepreneur but does not seem to realise that with great wealth comes great responsibility.
Ineos declined to comment when contacted by the Daily Mail. There is a little I agree on with Marxist shadow chancellor John McDonnell. But when he says ‘the greed of these super-rich tax avoiders seems to have no bounds’, it is hard to demur.
Employing highly-paid accountants to avoid tax within the law plays straight into the hands of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn.
How sad that a man like Sir Jim, who has achieved so much for Britain, has chosen a course of disloyalty and ingratitude when he could have emulated Gates and made his country proud.