Who is Sir Jim Ratcliffe, Britain’s richest man and Team Sky’s new backer who wants to buy Chelsea?
Who is the billionaire stepping in to save Team Sky from folding?
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Your support makes all the difference.Sir Jim Ratcliffe has been confirmed as the new owner of Team Sky, soon to be renamed Team Ineos after his petrochemicals company. With a net worth estimated at £21bn, Ratcliffe is Britain’s richest man, although strictly speaking he is not the richest man living in Britain, given he moved to Monaco last year to save on his tax bill.
Up until the past few years Ratcliffe had kept a low profile for a billionaire. He had a relatively modest upbringing in Lancashire and then Yorkshire during the 1950s and 60s before studying at the University of Birmingham and London Business School, and made his fortune recovering struggling companies in the oil and gas sector.
Politically, he is a passionate Brexiteer as well as a strong advocate for fracking, with Ineos poised to be one of the leaders should the UK’s shale gas industry take off. He has courted controversy after not only moving himself to a tax haven but also his company’s headquarters, shifting Ineos to a new base in Switzerland in 2010 before it returned to London five years later.
As well as being a keen cyclist, the 66-year-old is a passionate sailor and football fan. He owns Swiss Super League club FC Lausanne-Sport, where his investment brought in notable players including Enzo Zidane, the son of Zinedine. But he angered fans by attempting to redesign the historic club’s badge to incorporate elements of Ineos branding, including the petrochemical company’s distinctive ‘o’ and its orange colours. The proposed logo was scrapped after a backlash from supporters.
Ratcliffe was linked to a takeover of Chelsea Football Club last year with a reported £2bn bid rejected by Roman Abramovich, and is reported to retain a strong interest in buying the west London club. He also invested £110m in Olympic sailing champion Sir Ben Ainslie’s fresh attempt to win the America’s Cup.
Ineos is one of the biggest producers of plastics in the world, something at odds with cycling as a green activity and jarring quite spectacularly with Sky’s Ocean Rescue campaign which adorned last year’s race jerseys. Ratcliffe recently said he is exploring solutions such as biodegradable plastic, but that there are no “quick fixes”.
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