THE LIFE OF SANJEEV GUPTA, 44

Family: Married to Nicola with three children. ‘She used to look after my money – she was the treasurer of one of my businesses – and now she spends it,’ he says.

Born: Punjab, India

Education: St Edmunds College, Canterbury, and Trinity College, Cambridge

Lives: Chepstow

Drives: Has a chauffeur-driven Mercedes

Music: Simon and Garfunkel

Favourite film: The Godfather

Career: After A levels Gupta took a gap year and sold bicycles in Turkey for his father’s business, Victor Cycles. He then studied economics and management at Cambridge where he set up Liberty House, a commodities trading firm, in 1992. He was trading commodities from his halls of residence at

Cambridge but the business distracted him from his studies and it took a large amount of cramming in his final year for him to graduate with a 2.1. Liberty grew massively over subsequent years and now has an annual turnover of £4.2bn and operates from four global hubs – London, Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong with offices in 30 countries.

Working day: He gets up at 6am and checks emails from his global offices. ‘It’s an addiction,’ he says. ‘I’m sometimes up in the middle of the night checking emails.’ He travels between Liberty’s various businesses during the week and reckons he gets home by 8pm. But work doesn’t stop there. Most evenings he will host dinner meetings at his home in Chepstow with his management team and advisers.

Spare time: He claims he has only taken two holidays – one to Lanzarote after his A levels and a second to the Maldives for his honeymoon. ‘I am an archetypal workaholic,’ he admits.