NO GRATITUDE: Jim Ratcliffe ignores all the help and luck he had on his way to billionaire status

State school and university-educated Ratcliffe’s petrochemicals empire originated in privatised BP’s Antwerp chemicals business in the 1990s. From there it grew on debt, capitalising on low interest rates to borrow billions of pounds to buy other assets from oil companies. The landmark acquisition was BP’s producer of olefins (used in fabric fibres) for £9bn in 2005.

Following the 2008 financial crisis and the onset of very low interest rates, the company made a series of investments and joint ventures to expand its oil refining business, notably at Grangemouth in Scotland.

Although it was paying a premium that put its debt in “junk bond” territory at the time, low prevailing rates meant it still managed to keep a lid on finance costs.

The strategy worked well for majority shareholder Ratcliffe and fellow directors John Reece and Andy Currie (19 percent each), as dividends began to spurt out of the corporate gusher to fund billionaire trappings such as Ratcliffe’s £130m superyacht.

While austerity had shafted the UK economy, the ultra-low interest rates needed to keep the economy afloat enabled the likes of Ratcliffe to borrow hard and cash in. In four years up to 2019, the Ineos Group Holdings group, which runs the core Ineos chemical products group, paid out dividends totalling €2.8bn – even as its expensive debts climbed to €8bn.

By now Ratcliffe and co held the group through a Luxembourg holding company, itself owned by a Swiss headquarters company and then ultimately an Isle of Man company.

The measure of this structure’s tax efficiency was that over a decade up to 2025, the group’s pre-tax profits ran to €11.4bn (after €0.6bn losses in 2025) while its corporate tax payments totalled €1.4bn. At a rate of 12.5 percent, this was more than eight percentage points below the average UK rate over the period.

Not that the tax-dodging stood in the way of a knighthood for Ratcliffe in 2018 – the same year that he rose to the top of the Sunday Times Rich List with an estimated worth of £21bn (he’s now ninth, with £15.2bn).

Monte Carlo or bust
After coming through Covid unscathed, the cash continued to pour out, although even more lightly taxed than previously in Ratcliffe’s case, following his less than patriotic move to Monaco in the spring of 2020. In three years to 2023, Ineos Group Holdings paid out €1.4bn in dividends, including €700m in the final year.

This was already looking extravagant, given that rising post-Ukraine invasion prices for the oil and gas that are Ineos’s core inputs were already swallowing profits (down from €2.3bn in 2022 to €400m in 2023).

Ratcliffe is now at pains to point to the effect of these pressures, plus higher energy costs (not helped by the Brexit he argued for). But hardly less important was the growing impact of rising interest rates in the wake of the twin curses of Covid and Liz Truss. By 2024, the Ineos group was paying €1.34bn in finance costs, as debt headed to €15bn, doubling from a decade earlier, and interest rates on its borrowings stretched to 7.5 percent.

Snoozy Quattro
Another part of Ineos, its speciality chemicals and plastics arm Ineos Quattro, is even more troubled. It lost €1bn last year (and €819m the year before) after finance costs of €803m, thanks to debts running above €7bn. Its bonds currently trade at yields around 13 percent.

Ratcliffe and co have stopped extracting dividends from this and the core group, which together make up the bulk of the $50bn- turnover Ineos empire, but the real price for his chosen path is being paid by others.

Two weeks ago, Ratcliffe announced he was suspending operations at three acetyls chemical plants in Hull because of energy costs; in January 2025 he closed an ethanol producing plant in Grangemouth, which was soon followed by the closure of the port’s Petroineos crude processing plant (a joint venture with Petrochina). Four hundred jobs were lost.

Yet, although you won’t hear it from Ratcliffe, wider events often work in his favour. Profits at the core group spiked dramatically to €750m in the first half of this year, thanks largely to an Iran war dividend as Asian competitors found their supply chains more adversely affected. Even the beleaguered Quattro arm’s losses narrowed in the most recent quarter to a mere €35m.

Yet Ratcliffe still has only gripes. Interviewed by BBC business editor Simon Jack last month (in Denmark, handily sparing him one of his few allowed days in the UK), he was still aggrieved about the 2020 freeze on fracking in the UK (shale gas is a big money-spinner for Ineos in the US).

This cost Ineos £250m, only a tenth of the core group’s profits the following year, and the project was always likely to fall foul of local concerns as the earth began to shake during trials. There was no time for the grumbling Ratcliffe to mention the £125m government support in late 2025 for Ineos to upgrade its remaining plant at Grangemouth.

Goal difference
In 2024, again using an Isle of Man company, Ratcliffe acquired what is now a 29 percent stake in Manchester United and, with it, executive control over football matters. The hope was that he would bring some commercial nous to a company with debts of more than £1bn of its own.

So far, he’s achieved little beyond upsetting fans and staff, not least with a 40 percent redundancy programme (450 staff) and cancelling perks such as free meals at the club’s training ground, while the team slides down the Premier League table. Doubtless that will be somebody else’s fault, too.

With Bio-Waste Spreader: “Tragically, for thousands of farmers, the latest iteration of the government’s flagship agri-environment scheme, the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI), quickly descended into farce. This year’s application window for the scheme launched on 22 September at 10am but had to be closed less than six hours later as the £290m subsidy pot ran dry, leaving thousands of farmers out in the cold. The scheme has replaced the old EU farm subsidy for most English farmers…”

With MD: “And so, just 17 years after Gordon Brown’s Labour government first promised a National (Social) Care Service in England, Andy Burnham has promised it again – but only if Labour wins the next election. In 2010, Brown wrote the foreword to a white paper titled ‘Building the National Care Service’ and set out a route to ‘meet the needs of people when they need help, free when they need it. It will be for all – whoever you are, wherever you live, whatever your circumstances’…”

With Dr B Ching: “The government has thought of another excuse for avoiding thorough rail electrification: inadequate future power from the grid. Its rolling-stock and infrastructure strategy, published last week, at last shows Whitehall accepting the stupidities of rail fragmentation which the Eye highlighted during the Blair/ Brown Labour government and since. The future Great British Railways (GBR) will coordinate rolling-stock and infrastructure planning…”

With Lady Liberty: “No one has done more to smash through expected standards of political behaviour – sexual, financial, ethical – than Donald Trump. The bar for scandal in American politics is now far higher than it’s ever been before. In what must have seemed like a hot scoop, the New York Times recently revealed that Mary Peltola, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Alaska, was accused of ‘angry outbursts, slurs and firings’…”

With Remote Controller: “Three weeks into its 24th series, Strictly Come Dancing was perceived as being in trouble. Scandals over guest and professional conduct and the departure (through non- scandalous choice) of hostesses Claudia Winkleman and Tess Daly made this the first time that the whole presentation team had changed. The last BBC ratings banker to do that, Top Gear, set an ominous example of decline followed by hiatus. After much BBC furrowing, the duo became a trio,…”

With Old Sparky: “What are we to make of Great British Grid, Andy Burnham’s plan for taking more public control of our electricity system? Details were lacking in his conference speech, but it seems it won’t get any new money, just a share of a modest £4bn pot allocated to Great British Energy – so it’s a million miles away from nationalisation of the £56bn National Grid plc, just one of three large private companies that own and manage the grid...”

With Lunchtime O’Boulez: “An awkward moment at the Royal Opera House last week, as culture secretary Lisa Nandy complained during a panel discussion that ‘it does my head in that people think I’m a Philistine because I’m from Wigan’. But in truth those present were probably less concerned about Nandy’s origins than her future plans. The Royal Ballet and Opera has been courting Nandy in an attempt to dodge cuts to its public funding…”

Letter from Lusaka
From Our Own Correspondent: “‘I don’t have a lawyer, I cannot speak’ has become the infamous tagline on social media here in mineral-rich, democracy- light Zambia. It simply means that this is a time of repression, and any criticism of the authorities can land you in jail. The tagline has become more pronounced following heavily disputed presidential and parliamentary elections in August…”

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