Inside lavish world of Man U suitor Jim Ratcliffe who made billions from chemicals but was once fired for a crazy reason
HE may no longer be Britain’s Richest Man but Sir Jim Ratcliffe is still the world’s wealthiest Mancunian.
And with a personal fortune of around £11BILLION he can certainly afford to buy Manchester United.
This week he let it be known he would jump at the chance to buy into the Premier League football colossus, owned by the American Glazer family.
Eventually Sir Jim hopes to take over the entire club, said by the club’s current owners to be worth £5billion.
He is so wealthy he would not need to borrow a penny to buy Man United, invest heavily in new players and modernise Old Trafford.
And the money men certainly think he is serious.
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United’s shares on New York’s stock exchange had yesterday jumped 15 per cent to more than £11 each.
Sir Jim offered £4billion to buy Chelsea in May but admitted he only made the — the team he has followed since boyhood — wasn’t available.
As he approaches his 70th birthday, the joiner’s son who grew up on a Manchester council estate, could land the present he has always dreamed of — owning Old Trafford and the Red Devils.
Sport-mad Sir Jim has come a long way from Dunkerly Avenue, Failsworth, where he lived until he was ten and went almost every other week to watch Sir Matt Busby’s team in action.
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In 1999 he was in Barcelona at the Nou Camp stadium when United came back at the death to beat Bayern Munich 2-1 to win the Champions League.
Sir Jim described it as “three minutes you never forget in your lifetime”.
So some things are priceless, even for a man whose mega-fortune comes from a 60 per cent stake in a privately owned chemical giant he always claims is “the world’s biggest company you have never heard of”.
In total 26,000 people work for Ineos at more than 194 sites in 29 countries.
The 60million tons of chemicals it makes each year go into almost everything we use, from antibiotics, toothpaste and clean water to insulation and food packaging.
All this means Sir Jim can afford a luxury home in Monaco, a £6million waterside mansion in Hampshire and a house in Chelsea, West London, near the Grenadier pub, where he came up with the idea for building a 4×4 to replace the Land Rover Defender.
He also owns a mega-house on Lake Geneva, Switzerland, near F1 star Michael Schumacher’s home, and a 260ft super-yacht, Hampshire II.
If Sir Jim does eventually buy Man United from the American Glazer family he won’t be step-ping into the unknown because he already owns two football clubs.
In 2017 he bought Swiss side FC Lausanne-Sport — they were relegated last season into Swizerland’s second tier.
And in 2019 Sir Jim snapped up Nice, who play in France’s Ligue 1 for just under £100million.
He also spent £40million buying Sky’s Tour de France-winning cycling team and he regularly goes on training rides with stars of the Ineos Grenadiers.
He has shares in Mercedes’ Formula 1 operation and backs Sir Ben Ainslie’s bid for sailing’s America’s Cup, which Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge is part of.
I was fired for having mild eczema. I was told ‘You can’t work here, not with eczema. We can’t spend the money on training you for five years and then find you’ve got an allergy, so you’re on your bike.’
Jim Ratcliffe
Amazingly, Sir Jim only made his eye-watering fortune in the past 25 years.
Until then his life had been unremarkable.
He struggled at school because of his obsession with football, got into university with some of the worst A-level results of his college peers and got sacked from his first job.
His success came as a complete surprise to him too.
Sir Jim says: “You should see a picture of the council house where I started out. I just played football, really. That’s all I was interested in.”
His dad, who started out as a carpenter, worked his way up to run a factory making furniture for science labs.
His mum worked as a secretary.
The family moved to Beverly, East Yorks, when his dad landed a new job and Jim got into the local grammar school. In the sixth form he organised tours of local factories.
He says: “I suppose I did have this inkling that I wanted to be successful — that I wanted to be a millionaire one day. So those things were in my head at 18. But I was just dreaming, really.”
He chose to study chemical engineering at the University of Birmingham.
But he arrived at the chemistry department to find a group of students clustered around a noticeboard, reading a list of the 99 students on his course, ranked according to their A-level results.
Ratcliffe was embarrassed to find himself near the bottom.
He says: “It lacked a bit of sensitivity. But you could say it was fair. There were a lot of guys who had worked very hard at school while I was out playing football.”
Working for BP during the summer holiday he was offered a permanent job only to be sacked within three days.
He says: “I was called in by my boss who had been reading my medical report — they’d not bothered until then. I was fired for having mild eczema. I was told ‘You can’t work here, not with eczema. We can’t spend the money on training you for five years and then find you’ve got an allergy, so you’re on your bike.’”
Jim failed to persuade BP to take him on as a trainee accountant so he moved to fabric and chemicals firm Courtaulds, where he stayed until he was in his thirties.
Lured by the perk of a much better car, a white BMW 535i, he switched to becoming a dealmaker with the venture capital company Advent International.
He says: “They tripled my salary and offered me a fancy car. I did like that car — it was better than the one the chairman of Courtaulds had.
“The venture capital world is very simple. If you do bad deals, you get fired. If you don’t do any deals, you get fired. I took that job because it would present a lot of opportunities. I always had a feeling that a really good one would come along.”
In 1992, he bought BP’s specialist chemicals operation for about £40million, floating it on the stock market two years later.
But Jim quit the company in 1998.
By then his ten-year marriage to first wife Amanda Townson, with whom he has two sons, George and Samuel, had ended in divorce.
He has a daughter with second wife, Alicia. He is now believed to be with current partner Catherine Polli.
His fortunes changed for the better when he bought an Antwerp-based chemicals business which became the start of Ineos.
I suppose I did have this inkling that I wanted to be successful — that I wanted to be a millionaire one day. So those things were in my head at 18. But I was just dreaming, really.
Jim Ratcliffe
Jim and his new business partners, Andy Currie and John Reece, became masters at spotting untapped potential in flagging plants and factories.
Sir Jim says: “We’d look at businesses that were unfashionable or unsexy, facilities owned by large corporations. We’d run them a bit better, make them busy and very profitable.”
The deals got bigger and bigger and by 2018 Jim’s share of the business made him Britain’s richest man with a fortune of £21billion.
A supporter of Brexit and fracking, he wants Britain to manufacture more.
He says: “You can’t have an economy of 70million people where you don’t make any products. If you do, every time you want to buy a product you first have to buy some foreign exchange and find a country to sell it to you. That’s dumb — you end up with a fragile economy.”
While United’s fans are praying Sir Jim will come to the club’s rescue — they are at rock bottom after two games that both ended in defeat — business experts were warning them not to get too hopeful.
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While the Glazers say United is worth £5billion, the stock market values the club at much less.
Sky TV Business Presenter Ian King says: “Sir Jim Ratcliffe has never knowingly overpaid for anything in his career.”
