"Our billionaire count is down"
The billionaire Hinduja family have topped The Sunday Times Rich List again.
The family topped the list with an estimated fortune of £35.304 billion, despite it being nearly £2 billion less than last year.
While the Hinduja name might not be familiar to many, the companies the family owns or has owned are household names.
Gopichand Parmanand Hinduja’s business empire began in textiles and trading in Bombay and Tehran. He worked alongside his elder brother Srichand, who died in 2023.
Their commercial instincts led to the creation of the Hinduja Group – a global conglomerate.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, the brothers acquired Ashok Leyland from British Leyland, Gulf Oil, and later banks in Switzerland and India.
In 2012, the group bought Houghton International, the world’s largest metal fluids manufacturer, in a deal worth over £750 million.
Despite the group’s success, Gopi maintains a low personal profile. He and his brothers are vegetarians and teetotal.
He became a British citizen in 1997. The following year, Srichand was also naturalised.
The process caused political fallout when a Labour MP resigned after revealing he had lobbied an immigration minister on Srichand’s behalf.
Gopi is married to Sunita Hinduja. They have three children – Sanjay, Dheeraj and Rita.
Sanjay made headlines in 2015 when he married designer Anu Mahtani in a lavish ceremony reported to cost £15 million.
Jennifer Lopez, Nicole Scherzinger and Arjun Kapoor all performed at the celebrations.
Despite the Hinduja topping the list, the UK has suffered the biggest fall in billionaires on record after Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ recent tax crackdown on non-doms and British businesses.
The number of billionaires dropped to 156 this year from 165 in 2024, representing the sharpest decline in The Sunday Times Rich List‘s 37-year history.
Robert Watts, compiler of the Rich List, said:
“Our billionaire count is down and the combined wealth of those who feature in our research is falling.
“We are also finding fewer of the world’s super-rich are coming to live in the UK.”
He said he was also “struck by the strength of criticism for Rachel Reeves’s Treasury” when speaking to wealthy individuals for the publication.
Mr Watts added: “We expected the abolition of non-dom status would anger affluent people from overseas.
“But homegrown young tech entrepreneurs and those running centuries-old family firms are also warning of serious consequences to a range of tax changes unveiled in last October’s budget.”
The list’s biggest loser is Ineos founder and Manchester United part-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe, whose wealth has declined by around £6.4 billion for the second consecutive year. But he is still seventh on the overall list with a wealth of around £17 billion.
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