15. Eddie Healey & Family
£750m
Stadium (Holdings)
2008: £1,150m (-£400m)
British Land sold a 50% stake in its Meadowhall shopping centre near Sheffield for £587.7m to investment company London & Stamford and an unidentified partner in February 2009. Meadowhall was valued at £1.4bn in September 2008, so British Land took a sizeable hit with the sale.
Even so, that value reflects what a goldmine Eddie Healey and partner Paul Sykes created. Their £1.17bn sale of Meadowhall in 1999 netted Healey around £420m for his 60% stake (taking account of £470m of debt in the sale price).
Having reinvested some of the Meadowhall proceeds, we can see around £650m of net assets in the 2007 accounts of three Healey family companies, including Stadium Holdings.
But the jewel in his crown is CentrO, Europe's largest shopping centre built on 196 acres of an old steelwork site on the Ruhr in the late 1990s. With its success and scarcity value, it should easily be worth £300m on its own in the current difficult climate.
In all, Eddie Healey, 71, should be worth perhaps £750m, allowing for any double counting.