Jim Ratcliffe

With over twenty one billion Ineos owner Jim Ratcliffe became the richest man in Britain in 2018, ranked number one on the Sunday Times list. Ratcliffe’s Ineos is Britain’s biggest privately owned company, selling more than 60m tons of chemicals annually for use in the packaging, food, construction, textile, white goods and car manufacturing industries and employing 18,500-plus staff. Ratcliffe, the son of a joiner and an office worker mother, has become the world’s richest Mancunian. Growing up in Failsworth on the outskirts of the city, he used to count the chimneys he could see from the council house he shared with his parents. Many of the industrial chimneys may have stopped puffing across the city’s skyline but the 65-year-old certainly controls a good number of other ones at more than 100 sites in at least 20 countries. His journey to entrepreneur went via grammar school and a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Birmingham in 1974.