When Land Rover discontinued his favourite car, he built his own. Now he’s set his sights on his childhood football club. Nick Rufford goes on the road with the Ineos boss.
Jim Ratcliffe so dislikes the limelight he has turned off the light in his fridge, or so the joke goes among his friends. The billionaire entrepreneur, mountaineer, marathon runner, sports team owner and part-time beekeeper has been called secretive, reclusive and publicity shy, as well as Dr No for his uncompromising negotiating style and “JR”, as in Ewing, the wily oil tycoon in Dallas.
“I know what you’re going to ask and the answer is no comment,” he growls when we meet. It’s a classic Ratcliffe opener: bluff, northern, contrarian, but with a hint of a smile. “As you know, we are now formally in the process to buy the club and so can’t make any public comments,” a spokesman adds.
You can hardly blame Ratcliffe for side-stepping questions about Manchester United. He doesn’t want to jeopardise the fulfilment of a childhood dream, not to mention the possible setting of a record for the most expensive purchase of a sports club. The highest paid so far is US$4.65 billion (about $7.3 billion) for the Denver Broncos in the NFL in 2022. Manchester United could fetch £5 billion ($9.6 billion). Would he stretch to that? “If you’re going to do something, you either go all out or you don’t do it at all,” he says.
Ratcliffe was first publicly to declare an interest when the Glazer family, United’s current owners, hinted at a sale last year — albeit a minority stake. As the owner of two football clubs, OCG Nice in the French first division and the Swiss side Lausanne-Sport, he arguably has the experience. He also has the means.
He built Ineos, the industrial giant that made him rich, using the kind of leveraged finance a £5 billion deal would require. Plus he has billions sloshing around in the bank. In 2018 he topped The Sunday Times Rich List with a £21 billion fortune and “should be very high up this year’s list” according to Robert Watts, its compiler.
As global gas prices reached historic highs over the past 18 months, Ineos’s fortunes soared. The company has 20 ocean-going tankers shuttling gas from the US to Europe. In June he sealed a 20-year deal to ship huge quantities from the Texas Gulf Coast.
“We’re not short of opportunities,” Ratcliffe says. “We’ve just done a colossal deal in China. There are probably three other very large transactions we’re looking at in Ineos at the moment. We’re at US$65 billion [sales]. We’ve got oil and gas and our core business of petrochemicals, plus our new automotive division.”
No wonder the friends who joke about his preoccupation with privacy call him “Lucky Jim”. Is he lucky? “It’s odd, but I find the harder I work, the luckier I get,” he says, quoting Thomas Jefferson with a grin. It took Ratcliffe, 70, just two decades to reach the top of the Rich List, through shrewd acquisition of unwanted or orphaned chemicals sites from corporations such as BP and ICI. By stripping out waste and ramping up production, he made them profitable.
Today Ineos has sales equal to the GDP of a medium-sized country and supplies everything from pharmaceuticals to the plastic in Lego. “It’s the biggest company in the world you have never heard of,” he says.
True, Ratcliffe’s assets may be dwarfed by sovereign wealth funds and by Silicon Valley moguls — Elon Musk once expressed an interest in buying Man Utd, albeit jokingly. Ratcliffe has an advantage over rival bidders: he’s home-grown. Raised on the outskirts of Manchester, he was a boyhood United fan. His council estate home was just across the city from Old Trafford. His fascination with football continued after he moved with his family to the other side of the Pennines, aged nine. As a teenager he had a Saturday job selling Hull City Golden Goal lottery tickets. “I wore the team’s kit, got a free seat — one of the best in the ground — and loved it.”
Yet Manchester United remained his first and true love.
As we talk, Ratcliffe is at the wheel of a 4x4 and we’re making brisk progress along the windswept Scottish coast. To the left of the track is a stone wall, to the right the crashing waves of Pentland Firth. He designed the vehicle himself after Land Rover announced in 2016 it was discontinuing its classic Defender. With friends he sketched out the idea for a successor in his favourite pub in Belgravia — and named the Grenadier after it. He has flown to the Highlands from Monaco, where he lives, to put the finished product through its paces in winter conditions.
“It’s a combination of British knowhow and German engineering,” he says proudly. So far he has spent £1.34 billion on what is both a labour of love and a serious business venture. Is he taking a gamble going up against the auto giants? He’s sanguine. “It is a risk but it’s a manageable risk really. It’s not going to break the bank.”
Dressed in jeans and woollen scarf, and standing 6ft 4in, he doesn’t look like one of the Monaco jet set. On closer inspection, though, his winter jacket is made by Belstaff, a brand he owns. He wore its clothing on wilderness expeditions, liked it and bought the company. He’s a compulsive traveller. His search for adventure has taken him to the North and South Poles on skis and by ship in 2019 through the treacherous Northwest Passage, dodging icebergs in his explorer vessel, Sherpa. “For three weeks I didn’t see another ship or meet another human being, only polar bears,” he says.
He has climbed the Matterhorn, run across the Namibian desert and completed an Ironman triathlon aged 64. Competitors must swim 3.8km, cycle 180km and run a full marathon. He completed it in an impressive 14 hours and 44 minutes.
Does he seek out danger? “I don’t take risks unnecessarily,” he says. “To give you an example, I won’t and would never jump out of an aeroplane, because you either live or die depending upon how well someone’s packed your parachute. I’ve done a bungee jump because I don’t think there’s too much risk attached. I’m quite careful, but you’re only here once so you get more out of life if you challenge yourself a bit more.”
To celebrate his 60th birthday in 2012, he and a dozen companions motorcycled round southern Africa, covering 9,655km in 100 days. The group included his two sons, Sam and George, from his ten-year marriage in 1985 to Amanda Townson. He also has a teenage daughter, Julia, from a later relationship with Maria Alessia Maresca, an Italian tax lawyer.
During the Africa expedition he came a cropper and broke three bones in his foot. The local hospital applied a plaster cast too tightly, cutting off the blood supply and leaving him in fear of amputation. In typical Ratcliffe style he cut off the cast with an electric saw and asked for a ski boot to be shipped out to help the bones set. “I think I’m the only person ever to have worn a ski boot in Namibia,” he jokes.
Do his sons, now in their mid-thirties, share his appetite for risk? “Yeah, they grew up understanding risk and a bit of adventure and just getting out there and challenging yourself a bit really. If you go up the Matterhorn there’s obviously risk, but you’re going up with a guide who’s been climbing all his life. I always try to pick a guide who’s got a wife and children because they have the most to lose. What you don’t want is a 25-year-old gung-ho guide.”
Guide or no guide, he admits he almost lost George, his younger son, on the Matterhorn. “George was only 13 when we climbed the Matterhorn. Sam was 15. It was a nice moment, sitting at the top, having a sandwich. Then on the way down George slipped. The guide had to arrest him on the rope really quickly, but he survived. The most dangerous bit of the Matterhorn is after you leave the summit, because it’s seriously vertical and it’s ice and you’re on crampons. If you slip when you’re going up you just fall forward, but when you’re going down and you slip you don’t stop until you hit the ski resort a couple of miles below.”
Shepherding his sons to the poles was no less dangerous, even if it was character-building for them, he says. He reached the North Pole in 2009 after an exhausting trek across broken and shifting ice. “You pull a big heavy sledge and it’s very cold and uncomfortable. The ice cap’s always moving with the currents and the wind and parts of it break off. Then you encounter mountains of ice and you’ve got to drag your sledge over them.”
Two years later Ratcliffe set out to score the double by reaching the South Pole on the 100-year anniversary of Roald Amundsen’s historic expedition. The Norwegian explorer was the first to plant the flag there, on December 14, 1911.
“It was one of the more miserable experiences of my life,” he says. “There’s nothing uplifting about spending all day [on skis] pulling an 80-kilo sledge over ice waves. But there’s no feeling quite like getting to the South Pole after you’ve walked 200 kilometres. It’s the highs and lows of life, isn’t it? The highs are better if you’ve experienced a few lows beforehand. You can’t just have highs all the time.”
As well as his place in Monaco, he owns a house on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland and another in Hampshire. He moved there after mortgaging his earlier home to raise £140,000 to buy his first business in 1992. “I did my first deal when I was 40 and I bought the bit of BP that was based on Southampton Water next to the Fawley refinery,” he reflects. “I lived in the New Forest for 20 years. I still have a place there and lots of friends because that’s where the kids went to school.”
He liked the area so much he named his two superyachts Hampshire and Hampshire II. Now he’s developing a seven-acre plot on the Solent coast to include a beachfront house, luxury summer house, lake and four-car garage. It took him five attempts to gain planning consent and he was forced to seek retrospective permission for some sheds he used for beekeeping equipment. He’s a keen apiarist and produces his own honey. He’s bought the Grenadier, his favourite London pub.
He also owns a New Forest hotel, the Lime Wood, and one in Courchevel, France. A clubhouse he helped fund in Courchevel for the benefit of young skiers was recently the subject of controversy. The Charity Commission said it was reviewing the foundation behind it, which had received £7.4 million in gift aid from British tax authorities. There was no suggestion of wrongdoing or that Ratcliffe had received any financial benefit. He changed his residency from Britain to Monaco in 2020 just two years after receiving a knighthood, prompting complaints that having got the honour he then deserted Britain for sunnier, low-tax climes, a criticism that chafes.
“I didn’t move down there until I was well into retirement age [he was 67]. Going to the sun, I might live a bit longer in a warmer climate.”
What’s undeniable is that Ratcliffe’s wealth is hard won. The son of a joiner and a mother who worked in an accounts department, Ratcliffe has claimed he spent his schooldays kicking a ball around. “I just played football — that’s all I was interested in.”
That’s not entirely true. He worked hard enough to get to Birmingham University, where he got an upper second in chemical engineering. After getting fired from BP after three days — he had mild eczema and his boss didn’t want the responsibility of putting him to work near chemicals — he landed a job at Beechams pharmaceuticals and then Esso, before joining Courtaulds, a UK fabric and chemicals manufacturer. He juggled paid employment with qualifying as an accountant and taking an MBA at London Business School.
He admits he might have stayed in middle management, but in 1987 he took a call from Advent International, a Boston-based private equity group. He was offered a £90,000 salary with a £25,000 bonus compared with the £37,000 he was earning at Courtaulds. “I was impressed that the job came with a BMW 535i to replace my Vauxhall Cavalier,” he recalls. At Advent he discovered a talent for raising leverage finance, a way of funding ventures without a public stock offering.
After five years learning how to do deals he branched out on his own, later to be joined by two friends, John Reece and Andy Currie. Each has a minority stake in Ineos — enough to make them billionaires in their own right. Ratcliffe is proud they are all state-school boys made good. “I’ve worked with them for 25 years and never had an argument. They’re both extremely capable, both Cambridge grads and both northern grammar-school boys like I am. We share similar values, we’re all good at what we do and we’re comfortable together.”
Ratcliffe has invested heavily in sport. As well as his football teams, he’s bankrolling the British cycling team previously known as Team Sky. He sank £110 million into an attempt at the America’s Cup after meeting Ben Ainslie, the Olympic yachtsman. Ineos Team UK lost out to Italy. He snorts when I mention it. “The bloody America’s Cup. That was an expensive decision.”
A keen long-distance runner, he also spent millions sponsoring a successful attempt by Eliud Kipchoge, arguably the greatest marathon runner of all time, to smash the two-hour barrier in 2019. Kipchoge ran 26.2 miles through the streets of Vienna in 1:59:40. “I can’t put it in words,” Ratcliffe said at the time. “Everyone around me was in tears, me too.” The colour of the vehicle we’re driving is named Eldoret Blue after the sky above Kipchoge’s Kenyan home town. Another colour from the Grenadier palette is Sela Green, named after a river in Iceland where Ratcliffe goes salmon fishing. He has purchased large areas of land along the Icelandic coast to help protect the North Atlantic salmon from pollution. It’s a move that put him in an exclusive club of global billionaires who between them own vast tracts of wilderness. Peter Thiel, the billionaire cofounder of PayPal, has bought up parts of New Zealand. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft’s Bill Gates own thousands of acres in the US.
Living overseas gives Ratcliffe an expat’s perspective on Britain’s problems, he says. He supported Brexit, and doesn’t regret it, but says things have gone backwards since the vote. “Britain is a £2 trillion economy. The government takes a trillion of that [in tax] and doesn’t spend it well.”
“I know our leaders like to pontificate on the world stage and get involved in all sorts of external events, but if I were running the UK I would be very focused on running essential services well. You’ve got healthcare, you’ve got policing, you’ve got education and you’ve got energy. They’re the four main ones and all four are a mess in the UK. If I look at other countries that I’ve lived in or have experienced, like America or Switzerland, Germany, France, they’re not in the same mess that the UK is in. There’s no excuse for it; it just needs to be managed competently.”
One thing that is smothering British manufacturing and holding back growth, he says, is high energy costs. Americans pay half what we pay for petrol and a third for gas, which is why their economy is rapidly pulling ahead. Britain has plentiful gas supplies but refuses to develop them, he says. Last April his company wrote to Kwasi Kwarteng, then business secretary, offering to run — free of charge — a pilot site in Yorkshire producing cheap shale gas. He copied in Greg Hands, then energy minister. The project looked set to get the green light when Liz Truss was prime minister. Since she was swept from office there has been radio silence.
“We’ve got energy prices that are off the scale. [Yet] we’re sat on an awful lot of shale gas. Fracking is just so misunderstood as a concept. The oil industry fracks most [offshore] oil and gas wells anyway. All you do is put some pressurised water down the hole. Nothing complicated about that. It drives me mad.
“The government should have had an intelligent conversation with technical people about whether fracking is right or wrong, but they didn’t do that. They listened to Vivienne Westwood and a few noisy bloody demonstrators about shale.” Ratcliffe believes cheap energy could bring about a US-style revival in jobs and prosperity in Britain.
He’s offered to share 6 per cent of the revenues to help enrich everyone in the area of an onshore gas site. “That’s 6 per cent not just of the profits but the revenues,” he says. “That’s a colossal amount of money.”
He’s not optimistic the government will reply to his offer. He has a barely concealed disdain for politicians when it comes to their technical knowledge. Last week, when Michelle Donelan was appointed science minister, he wrote to The Times saying that the government “surely has to be kidding”. Donelan graduated from York University in history and politics. It’s the same story across Whitehall, Ratcliffe says.
“They’ve always done bloody Classics at Oxford or something like that. They’ve got no chance of ever understanding energy. If you look at America they have technical people in charge. They had a Nobel prize winner as the head of their Department of Energy a little while ago [Steven Chu, joint winner of the 1997 Nobel prize for physics].
“They’ve got a sensible hydrocarbon strategy. They’ve got a very sensible nuclear power strategy where they use Generation III predominantly pressurised water reactors. Britain once had a full suite of nuclear technology. Now the French own all our nuclear power stations.”
Ineos today sits at the centre of an international web of 36 oil, gas and petrochemicals businesses with 194 sites across 29 countries, employing 26,000 people. His biggest deal was the purchase of Innovene, a refining division of BP, in 2005, which included, among other plants, the huge Grangemouth works that supplies almost all the petrol and diesel to Scotland, Northern Ireland and much of northern England. “We got a lot of kit for our $9 billion,” he later said. “An awful lot of our success is based on buying assets at 30 or 40 cents on the dollar. It basically triples your return on capital. It’s much cheaper than building a new plant.”
The deal propelled Ratcliffe and Ineos into the first division of global companies. He went on to reap rich rewards from North Sea oil and gas. Now he’s helping offset his company’s carbon footprint by pumping carbon dioxide back beneath the ocean. Under a scheme being trialled by Ineos off the Danish coast, depleted oil fields could be repurposed as giant storage reservoirs for carbon dioxide, preventing it from going into the atmosphere. It’s a way of reversing the build-up of greenhouse gases by capturing them and locking them away, Ratcliffe says.
Along with his successes he’s had plenty of business failures and close calls. The world financial crisis in 2008 brought Ineos to its knees when the price of oil plummeted and demand for petrochemicals products, including plastics, collapsed. Hundreds of factories closed.
As a result of the crisis his company broke a covenant and was forced to renegotiate debts at a cost of £804 million. In danger of going under altogether, Ratcliffe tried to negotiate a deferral of a £350 million VAT bill. The Labour government of the time refused. In response Ineos decamped to Switzerland in 2010, to Canton de Vaud near Geneva, saving £400 million in tax and denying that money to the British Treasury.
Does he lose sleep over such setbacks?
“No, I don’t have sleepless nights really. I think if you suffered stress you wouldn’t sleep. When I go to bed I go to sleep. You’ve got things that happen that are out of your control, like the crisis in 2008.”
These days he’s trying to ease up a little, he says, by which he means he prefers half-marathons. His younger brother, Bob, with whom he kicked a ball around in his backyard, helped establish the football arm of the business. His two sons both work for Ineos. Is Ratcliffe thinking of kicking back and handing over the reins to his children?
“The best people finish up at the top of Ineos, not relatives,” he growls. “It might be a relative if they’re the most capable, which is fine. But no, I don’t think about retirement. I’ll just carry on until I can’t carry on. My two colleagues [John and Andy] and I will just continue until something happens, I suppose. When one of us dies we’ll have to deal with it.”
The cloak of relative obscurity Ratcliffe enjoys could slip if he gains control of Manchester United. Ownership could bring the unwelcome glare of publicity. Since buying the club in 2005, the Glazer family has faced fierce criticism, including accusations of underspend on infrastructure and chaotic player recruitment.
There are mixed views over whether Ratcliffe can see off rivals. A £5 billion price tag may seem high, but there are plutocrats, princelings and potentates to whom it is mere change. Still, Ratcliffe is nothing if not a fighter. The prospect of being a plucky hero is certainly better than being cast as a tax exile. But he has been here before and stalled. He contemplated bids for Newcastle and Leeds United. He lost out when Chelsea FC came up for sale last year. After offering a huge £2.5 billion plus £1.75 billion in future spend he was outflanked by a rival bidder, a wealthy consortium. Yet if Ratcliffe’s expeditions have taught him anything it’s that you never, ever give up.
The Rufford Review: Ineos Grenadier Fieldmaster
If you could put a Land Rover Defender, Toyota Land Cruiser and Mercedes G-Wagon into a blender you might end up with an Ineos Grenadier, writes Nick Rufford. As a fan of the classic Defender, Ratcliffe was dismayed when Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) decided in 2016 to scrap it. Sensing an opportunity, he devised a plan for a successor that would combine British knowhow with German engineering. Seven years and about €1.5 billion later, he’s gunning the finished product along the coast towards Thurso on the northern tip of Scotland. I’m navigating from the passenger seat. “Every child in England was brought up recognising the old Land Rover,” he says. “It was an iconic part of Jaguar Land Rover.”
Initially JLR was supportive of his plans. “They even wanted to sell us the jigs and presses to build it,” he recalls. The goodwill evaporated when Land Rover decided to build its own new Defender. In a U-turn it sued Ratcliffe for copyright, but he was too far down the road to stop and, in any case, couldn’t resist the challenge. He won the court case because Land Rover had failed to protect its own design.
So is the Grenadier any good? It withstood everything I threw at it during three days in the Highlands: rocky terrain, steep inclines, seawater, shale, boggy moorland. It was surprisingly quiet and comfortable on the road too. Its most appealing features have nothing to do with the way it drives, though. The Grenadier has switches that you can toggle up and down or push with a gloved hand in freezing weather.
To prevent dashboard clutter, some of the switches are raked across inside of the cabin roof like the controls in an aircraft. There are other neat touches. The start-up screen in most cars displays a legal warning about paying attention. When you turn the key in the Grenadier the screen simply reads: “Keep your eyes on the road and your hand upon the wheel.” It’s a lyric by the Doors — a band from Ratcliffe’s youth — and a salute to adventure.
Written by: Nick Rufford
© The Times of London