Gopichand Hinduja, head of Britain’s richest household, dies aged 85 | Enterprise

[ad_1] Gopichand Hinduja, the billionaire head of Britain’s richest household, has died aged 85.

Hinduja died on Tuesday in London after a protracted sickness, a spokesperson stated.

The low-profile Hinduja household topped the Sunday Instances Wealthy Checklist this 12 months with a collective internet value of £35.3bn, due to their sprawling enterprise pursuits throughout banking, oil, actual property and leisure.

Gopichand Hinduja, nicknamed “GP”, co-chaired the household enterprise together with his older brother Srichand, who died in 2023.

The brothers moved to London from India within the Nineteen Seventies, the place they continued to construct the Hinduja Group. It now employs greater than 150,000 individuals worldwide.

The household empire expanded by way of a sequence of huge acquisitions together with the 1987 buy of the Ashok Leyland group, which included elements of the defunct British automotive enterprise British Leyland. The group additionally purchased Gulf Oil from the US oil firm Chevron within the Eighties.

Gopichand Hinduja was embroiled in controversy in 2001 when it got here to gentle that he had written to Peter Mandelson, a authorities minister on the time, about acquiring a UK passport for his brother Prakash.

The brothers additionally donated £1m by way of their charitable basis to the Millennium Dome undertaking in London, which Mandelson was then overseeing.

The brothers’ late father, Parmanand, started buying and selling carpets, tea and spices in 1914, in part of what was then British India however is now Pakistan. He later took the enterprise to Iran.

The household’s London house is an 18th-century mansion on Carlton Home Terrace, overlooking St James’s Park and near Buckingham Palace. Their property portfolio additionally contains the historic Outdated Struggle Workplace (OWO) constructing in Whitehall, which they've became a luxurious growth.

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The OWO growth, by which one four-bedroom flat offered for greater than £40m, ought to beneath planning guidelines include 8,000 sq metres of inexpensive housing – sufficient for 98 flats.

Nevertheless, Westminster metropolis council agreed to permit the Hinduja household to develop the constructing with no inexpensive housing after their brokers claimed that it will “not be economically possible” to take action.