City profile

Sir Chris Hohn

“Even in a sector accustomed to generous salaries”, Sir Chris Hohn’s pay packet stands out, said James Hurley and Dominic Walsh in The Times. A Companies House filing shows that the hedge fund manager scooped £343m in the year to February 2020, overtaking the previous £323m record for a British boss set by Bet365 gaming mogul Denise Coates – the world’s most highly paid woman. It’s perhaps unfortunate that the largesse (paid in dividends, and equivalent to £940,000 a day) was revealed just as one of his protégés, Rishi Sunak, was grappling with public finances on Budget day.

Still, as hedgies go, Sir Chris, whose fund is named The Children’s Investment Fund (TCI), is among the most generous. One of Britain’s biggest individual taxpayers, he’s a noted philanthropist – hence, the knighthood – who donated over £270m in 2019 to children’s charities and projects tackling global warming. He’s known for pressuring listed companies to act on climate change – he once castigated the asset management industry for its sheeplike inability to act. “Highly private” Hohn, 54, broke cover during his record-breaking divorce in 2013 to call himself “an unbelievable moneymaker”, said Lucy Burton in The Daily Telegraph. He’s entirely selfmade. The son of a Jamaican car mechanic who emigrated to Britain in 1960, he set up TCI in 2003, after stints at Apax Partners and Perry Capital. Once described as “an undisputed headbanger”, Hohn is renowned for forcing radical change in underperforming European companies.