I was sacked from my job for ridiculous reason… but now I’m worth £6billion and want to buy Man Utd
A MAN who was once given the boot from his job for a ridiculous reason is now worth a colossal £6billion and hopes to buy Manchester United.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe, 70, tabled a bid for the Red Devils after the Glazers put the club up for sale in November last year.
The move was confirmed by a spokesperson who said: “We have formally put ourselves into the process.”
Sir Jim first revealed he was interested last summer, with a spokesperson saying: “If the club is for sale, Jim is definitely a potential buyer.
He is so wealthy he would not need to borrow a penny to buy Man United, invest heavily in new players and modernise Old Trafford.
Sir Jim offered £4billion to buy Chelsea in May but admitted he only made the offer because United — the team he has followed since boyhood — wasn’t available.
Now, the joiner’s son who grew up on a Manchester council estate, could land the present he has always dreamed of — owning Old Trafford and the Red Devils.
His fortune comes from a 60 per cent stake in a privately-owned chemical giant he always claims is “the world’s biggest company you have never heard of”.
In total 26,000 people work for Ineos at more than 194 sites in 29 countries.
The 60million tons of chemicals it makes each year go into almost everything we use, from antibiotics, toothpaste and clean water to insulation and food packaging.
LUXURY PROPERTIES
All this means Sir Jim can afford a luxury home in Monaco, a £6million waterside mansion in Hampshire and a house in Chelsea, West London, near the Grenadier pub, where he came up with the idea for building a 4×4 to replace the Land Rover Defender.
He also owns a mega-house on Lake Geneva, Switzerland, near F1 star Michael Schumacher’s home, and a 260ft super-yacht, Hampshire II.
Sir Jim already owns two football clubs.
In 2017 he bought Swiss side FC Lausanne-Sport — they were relegated last season into Swizerland’s second tier.
And in 2019 Sir Jim snapped up Nice, who play in France’s Ligue 1 for just under £100million.
However, he only managed to amass his fortune in the last 25 years, having struggled at school and got the sack from his first job.
COUNCIL HOUSE ORIGINS
Sir Jim said: “You should see a picture of the council house where I started out. I just played football, really. That’s all I was interested in.”
He chose to study chemical engineering at the University of Birmingham.
But he arrived at the chemistry department to find a group of students clustered around a noticeboard, reading a list of the 99 students on his course, ranked according to their A-level results.
Sir Jim was embarrassed to find himself near the bottom.
He worked for BP during the summer holiday and was offered a permanent job only to be sacked within three days.
SACKED WITHIN THREE DAYS
He said: “I was called in by my boss who had been reading my medical report — they’d not bothered until then. I was fired for having mild eczema. I was told ‘You can’t work here, not with eczema. We can’t spend the money on training you for five years and then find you’ve got an allergy, so you’re on your bike.’”
Jim failed to persuade BP to take him on as a trainee accountant so he moved to fabric and chemicals firm Courtaulds, where he stayed until he was in his thirties.
Lured by the perk of a much better car, a white BMW 535i, he switched to becoming a dealmaker with the venture capital company Advent International.
He said: “They tripled my salary and offered me a fancy car. I did like that car — it was better than the one the chairman of Courtaulds had.
“The venture capital world is very simple. If you do bad deals, you get fired. If you don’t do any deals, you get fired. I took that job because it would present a lot of opportunities. I always had a feeling that a really good one would come along.”
In 1992, he bought BP’s specialist chemicals operation for about £40million, floating it on the stock market two years later.
But Jim quit the company in 1998.
START OF CHEMICALS BUSINESS
His fortunes changed for the better when he bought an Antwerp-based chemicals business which became the start of Ineos.
Jim and his new business partners, Andy Currie and John Reece, became masters at spotting untapped potential in flagging plants and factories.
Sir Jim says: “We’d look at businesses that were unfashionable or unsexy, facilities owned by large corporations. We’d run them a bit better, make them busy and very profitable.”
The deals got bigger and bigger and by 2018 Jim’s share of the business made him Britain’s richest man with a fortune of £21billion.
Sir Jim and Qatari Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani remain the leading contenders for Manchester United.
However, the club could still remain in the hands of the Glazer family – after US hedge fund Elliott Management made an offer to take a minority stake that will allow the owners to remain in charge.
Ineos are targeting the Glazers’ 69 per cent stake while the Qatari aims for a full buy-out.