Heading up the list at number 1 is Galen and George West and family who own Selfridges and Primark. Before reading, I was only aware of them owning Primark and thought cor-blimey I'm surprised Primark is top, but the fact they own Selfridges as well kind of explains it seeing as Selfridges graces 3 cities in the UK alone and other stores worldwide include Russia, The United Arab Emirates and Japan.
Not far behind this is Sir Philip Green, who of course owns the Arcadia Group which includes Topshop/Topman, Dorothy Perkins, BHS, Miss Selfridge, Evans, Burton, Outfit & Wallis. Thats a lot of shops. Philip recently added Etam UK to the Arcadia family and paid £850 million for it. He repaid the £805 million he borrowed to finance the deal in a mere 2 years of buying it, so he's certainly still making a hell of a lot of money and clearly deserves his place in the top 3.
Number 3 surprised me slightly. Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay who own Littlewoods have that position. They originally bought the company off of the Moores family for £750 million and then sold off what was left of the Liverpudlian stores to make it a remotely online service. Along side this they also own Yodel, the couriers, which is notorious for its poor server which consequently cost them £130 million in 2011. Poor them, I'm sure they'll live with the other 2.25 billion that they're worth.
Mike Ashley of Sportsworld and Sportsdirect is next which again I question because it seems to me lately a lot of sports stores have been going under. This might be because Sportsworld is thriving so much it's putting everyone else out of business! Every sports shop I've walked past in the past year seems to either be having 75% off sales or closing down sales but I guess they're not lying to me.
One thing I have noticed by researching more into these people is a lot of them seem to be tax dodgers. If you're a high earner (and thats putting it lightly), you need to pay your tax naughty people!!
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