[ad_1]
The U.Okay. is within the throes of a cost-of-living disaster, with actual wages declining at a file charge this 12 months—however amid the financial turmoil, one of many nation’s wealthiest individuals cashed in on a file payday as his hedge fund’s earnings skyrocketed.
Billionaire Chris Hohn, who based TCI Fund Administration in 2003 and serves as its director, paid himself a dividend of virtually $690 million this 12 months, paperwork filed with the British authorities this week confirmed—the equal of virtually $1.9 million a day.
The payout is believed to be the best annual quantity ever paid to a single individual in Britain. It’s greater than 15,000 occasions greater than the U.Okay.’s median wage of £33,280 ($40,585), and broke Hohn’s personal file that was set when he paid himself $479 million final 12 months.
Representatives for Hohn weren’t out there for remark when contacted by Fortune.
Hohn, a Harvard Enterprise Faculty graduate and son of a Jamaican automotive mechanic, owns 100% of TCI—the world’s greatest performing massive hedge fund in 2019—and has a web price of $8.2 billion, in response to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
His file dividend got here after the London-based hedge fund—the place serving Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a multimillionaire, labored for Hohn between 2006 and 2009—noticed its pre-tax earnings dramatically bounce greater than 50% year-on-year to surpass $1 billion.
TCI holds stakes in corporations together with Alphabet, Microsoft and Visa, in response to the Guardian.
Final month, Hohn wrote to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, revealing TCI’s “vital” stake within the Google mother or father firm amounted to $6 billion. Within the letter, Hohn urged Pichai to take “aggressive motion” to cut back Alphabet’s prices, insisting that “the corporate has too many staff.”
Whereas TCI is headquartered in London’s high-end Mayfair district, it’s owned by The Youngsters’s Funding Fund Administration (Cayman) Restricted—a mother or father firm primarily based within the tax haven Cayman Islands.
Hohn himself is among the U.Okay.’s most outstanding philanthropists, gifting away $386 million via his charity the Youngsters’s Funding Fund Basis in 2019.
One in every of his main philanthropic endeavors is funding efforts to alleviate the local weather disaster, which he has made a central pillar of each his charity and his hedge fund.
Previously, he has publicly referred to as for companies that don’t make local weather disclosures to be punished, and TCI has threatened to dump its stakes in corporations that haven’t any emissions discount methods in place. The hedge fund requires corporations it invests in to make annual disclosures on their carbon emissions.
Hohn’s payouts to environmental initiatives embrace hundreds of kilos in donations to controversial activism group Extinction Revolt, a transfer he mentioned he made as a result of “humanity is aggressively destroying the world with local weather change and there may be an pressing want for us all to get up to this truth.”
Our new weekly Influence Report e-newsletter will look at how ESG information and tendencies are shaping the roles and tasks of right this moment’s executives—and the way they’ll greatest navigate these challenges. Subscribe right here.
Source link