Yahoo Finance British couple become wealthier than Larry Fink after £2.5bn BlackRock deal
A husband and wife duo who built an outdoor theatre on the grounds of their Suffolk farm estate have been catapulted into Britain’s rich list after netting £2bn from the sale of their financial data business.
Mark and Lindy O’Hare, who own a Grade-II listed farmhouse and 350-seat theatre, have struck a deal to sell their data group Preqin to fund giant BlackRock for £2.5bn.
Mr and Mrs O’Hare own 80pc of the business through their family holding company Valhalla Ventures, triggering a major payday once the deal completes.
The deal makes the couple richer than BlackRock boss Larry Fink, who founded the business 36 years ago and is worth £1.3bn.
Preqin sells financial data on alternative assets such as infrastructure, private equity and hedge funds to investment banks and City customers.
It was set up in London in 2002. Cambridge-educated Mr O’Hare ran the group as chief executive before stepping down in 2022. Mrs O’Hare worked at the firm until 2008.
More recently, the couple have built Thorington Theatre, which sits in cleared woodland on the site of a Second World War bomb crater.
The couple originally bought their farm six years ago to grow organic chestnuts and walnuts but decided to build a theatre, using timber from their land to construct the venue.
“I thought I was a farmer, then, at the age of 60, I’m suddenly running a theatre,” Mrs O’Hare told Country Life magazine last year.
“It sounded barking mad, but after walking past for a couple of months, I said to my husband, ‘Why don’t we do it?’ He’s the one who said, ‘Yes, we’ll do it with our own timber.’”
Preqin is just the latest sale by serial entrepreneur Mr O’Hare. He co-founded a management consultancy in the 1980s called Goodall Alexander O’Hare & Co after working at Boston Consulting Group.
In 1993, he founded shareholder information service Citywatch, before selling it five years later to Reuters.
Valhalla Ventures currently owns stakes in document automation tool Avvoka and Net Zero Insights, which provides ESG data.
BlackRock is buying the business 100pc in cash, giving Valhalla Ventures substantial financial firepower for further investing and philanthropy.
Mr O’Hare will join BlackRock as vice chair after the deal closes.
Some of Preqin’s 300 employees will also share the remaining £500m, with several expected to become multi millionaires overnight.
The deal will give BlackRock access to valuable financial data on private markets, which is harder to obtain than public data from the stock market.
Martin Small, BlackRock’s chief financial officer, said it would allow the business to push the “democratisation of alternatives” for retail investors.
The fund manager is hoping to use the private markets data to create price indices similar to the FTSE 100, which could unlock a new world for investors.
