Yahoo Finance Millions for charity … and Brexit: inside Peter Hargreaves’s world
Peter Hargreaves’s home in a village outside Bristol is, by billionaire standards, unusually modest. There are just two cars on the drive, no servants, and the couple cook for themselves. And last week he handed over £100m to charity: one of the largest individual donations in recent British history.
“The rich have not had a good press in this country,” says Hargreaves, whose personal wealth is estimated at £4bn. “But when you see how so many of them behave, it’s not that surprising really.”
The charitable foundation that will bear his name has been set up to help under-18s with a disadvantage or disability lead a fuller life. “It’s just something I felt strongly about,” says Hargreaves.
The donation catapults Hargreaves, 73, to the very top of the list of individual givers in the UK. The Charities Aid Foundation, which produces an annual “giving list”, said it ranks “among the largest by a UK philanthropist in the last five years”, matched only by the £109m donated by Stagecoach’s founder, Sir Brian Souter, last year, which was pumped into an existing charitable trust with a mission to help projects engaged in the relief of human suffering in the UK and overseas.
The Observer can reveal that Hargreaves has also given a substantial sum to the new £300m Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre, a state-of-the-art hospital near Loughborough that deals with amputees and complex brain injuries. He will not disclose how much, but in the 2018 accounts of the charity that raised money for the DNRC, it thanks him and his wife, Rosemary, for their “exceptional generosity”.
Hargreaves determinedly pays his taxes in the UK, and is scornful of his fellow super-rich who stash their fortunes in Monaco or the Caymans. Last week he was named in the Sunday Times Tax List of the top 50 biggest individual taxpayers in the UK, having paid £21.5m to the Treasury last year.
Yet this home-grown billionaire – he says his fortune makes him “definitely richer than Donald Trump” – has become a hate figure for some on the left. Why? Because Hargreaves is not just fond of donating to charities. In 2016 he made the single biggest donation to the Brexit campaign, handing £3.2m to the Leave.EU group. It helped pay for an anti-EU mailshot to one in three homes in the country.
“I don’t regret my Brexit donation one bit,” he says. “I strongly believe we will be better out of the EU. It was right that the money enabled the Leave campaign to have as big a shout as the Remain campaign. Remember, what they had was massive – they had Obama and the Bank of England pushing for Remain. It wasn’t balanced at all.”
Impervious to the controversy his Brexit donation attracted, in December he gave £1m to the Conservatives’ election war chest, despite once labelling Boris Johnson a “buffoon”. “That donation was more anti-Corbyn than pro-Tory,” he says. “He would have turned this country into Venezuela”. The payback from the subsequent Tory victory was immediate: as the election results came in, the value of Hargreaves’ shares soared by £90m, according to Forbes magazine’s real-time billionaires list.
Hargreaves’s fortune comes from his one-third ownership of Hargreaves Lansdown, the broking and advice company he began with Stephen Lansdown in 1981 from the spare bedroom of his house in Bristol. Today the firm is valued on the stock market at £8.8bn.
Hargreaves can be easily portrayed as one of the super-rich who uses his millions to bend election results, but he sees himself as a frugal man of the people. Born in Clitheroe, Lancashire, he attended the local grammar school and trained as an accountant. He’s proud of the fact that Hargreaves Lansdown is the only company listed in the FTSE 100 that got there without taking on debt or buying other companies.
He stepped down as chief executive in 2010 and left the board in 2015, but bemoans the scandal that has engulfed it since the suspension of the Woodford funds last June, which were heavily promoted on the Hargreaves platform. “There was never any scandal at Hargreaves Lansdown. Well, at least not when I was there.”
Last year he accused fund manager Neil Woodford of appearing not to be “truthful” but also said he was “annoyed that they [Hargreaves Lansdown] let it go on so long.”
But while Woodford investors are nursing losses of 40%, it has had little impact on Hargreaves’s own personal fortune. Floated at £1.60 a share in May 2007 – just months before the financial crisis sent Britain’s banks into freefall – the shares now change hands at £18.60. “I always thought we would be successful, it’s the size of the numbers now that have surprised even me.”
“We have a moderate lifestyle. I go to the local pub, we eat at the local restaurant, I play golf at the local club. I have a Land Rover Discovery Sport, but it’s not the top-of-the-range one. When we go abroad we stay in the best hotels, but we don’t even do that much now.”
If Hargreaves spent £1m every day for the next 10 years, he would still have around £300m to spare. “Yes, it’s like winning the lottery every week.” Does he have a butler? “Good God, no. We do all our own cooking. We wouldn’t enjoy having servants around the house. Who would?”
But the frugality shtick only goes so far. He may have the low-end Land Rover – but he also owns an Embraer Legacy 500 private jet, which can seat a dozen passengers in luxury and sells for about £15m.
The first £50m of the donation was transferred to the charity last week, in the form of shares in Hargreaves Lansdown, while a second £50m tranche will be handed over in the next tax year.
Crucial for Hargreaves was getting his children involved. His daughter, 29, and son, 31, will both be trustees on the new Hargreaves Foundation, and he adds: “I did it only because they were fully behind it.”
Do the rich use charitable foundations as some sort of tax dodge? Hargreaves scoffs at the suggestion, although his answer is revealing about his philanthropy. “It was right to set it up now, rather than have it go through probate.”
Hargreaves suffered a heart attack five years ago at the age of 68, and although he doesn’t use the phrase specifically, throughout the interview, there is the sense that this multibillionaire has realised you can’t take it with you.
