Rex Features
Hugh Grosvenor, seventh Duke of Westminster, wears his wealth effectively. When he inherited his late father’s fortune of round £9.5bn final summer time, he was variously described as Britain’s fifth richest man and the richest man in the world under 30. Fortune hunters have been urged by tabloids to beat a path to his door. Yet they might have been dissatisfied, for one appears in useless for indicators of profligacy or perhaps a playboy way of life. Hughie, as he’s recognized, spends quite a lot of his time behind a desk in the accounts division of a small London recycling firm, performs a very good recreation of cricket and nonetheless lives primarily at the household property in Cheshire. The duke, 26, is a modest chap who refuses to let his riches outline him, regardless of being the titular head of a household agency value near £10bn.
The Grosvenor Group has land holdings that embody greater than 1,500 properties in 60 nations. In London, it owns 50 per cent of Mayfair (together with the freeholds of the American embassy, the Beaumont Hotel and the Gagosian Gallery) and 300 acres of Belgravia. It has the household’s Eaton Estate in Cheshire and the Abbeystead Estate in Lancashire. There are additionally estates in Scotland and Spain, and it nearly rebuilt Liverpool’s metropolis centre. There is a procuring centre in Stockholm, a residential tower in Tokyo, a big chunk of Silicon Valley and all of Annacis Island, close to Vancouver.
But regardless of all this property, all this cash, all this energy, Hughie has nearly no management over the firm that bears his identify.
In the Fifties, the Grosvenor household positioned their principal property in a collection of trusts to guard the property from spendthrift heirs, disastrous divorce and different threats. According to Hugi Clarke, a director of the Foresight Group, an estate-planning agency, which means that the duke and his household obtain the advantages however don’t have any ‘absolute right’ to the property. So if Hughie needed to promote some juicy plum from the portfolio – say the freehold of the Beaumont Hotel – for some additional spending cash, he wouldn’t be capable of do it with out the consent of the Grosvenor trustees. Currently there are seven trustees, together with the duke. They are led by government trustee Mark Preston, who can be day-to-day boss of the empire, and they might be impossible to conform to something that would jeopardise the Grosvenors’ monetary wellbeing.
