Sir David Rowat Barclay and Sir Frederick Hugh Barclay (both born 27 October 1934), commonly referred to as the “Barclay Brothers”, are British businessmen. The identical twin brothers have very substantial business interests primarily in media, retail and property. The Sunday Times Rich List of 2015 estimated their wealth at £6.5 billion. They have earned a reputation for avoiding publicity, and are often described as reclusive.
Sir David’s son, Aidan, manages their UK businesses. Their businesses have been accused of tax avoidance, by placing assets under ownership of companies registered abroad and controlled through trusts. Their Press Holdings company owns The Business and The Spectator magazine. The Telegraph Group Limited titles are controlled via a wholly owned subsidiary, Press Acquisitions Limited.
In 1993 the brothers bought the lease of the island of Brecqhou, off the coast of Sark, one of the smallest of the British Channel Islands.
Biography
The Barclay brothers were born within ten minutes of each other in Hammersmith, County of London to Scottish parents Beatrice Cecilia (née Taylor; died 1989) and her husband, Frederick Hugh Barclay, a travelling salesman. The couple had eight other children. Frederick, Sr. died when the brothers were twelve years old, and they left school four years later in 1950 to work in the accounts department at the General Electric Company before setting up as painters and decorators.
In 1955 David married Zoe Newton, a grammar school girl who trained as a ballet dancer, at St John the Baptist Church, Holland Road, Kensington. Despite standing only 4’11” (1.5 metres), Zoe Barclay pursued a modelling career and became the most photographed and highly paid model of her time, appearing on the front of popular magazines such as Picturegoer. She appeared on television and in the Dairy Council advertisements as the “drinka pinta milka day“ girl.
By the end of the 1950s, the brothers were running Candy Corner, a tobacconists and confectioners on the edge of Kensington. However, in November 1960 the business folded when Frederick and Douglas [clarification needed] were made bankrupt at the High Court after their landlord seized the shop because they were in breach of the terms of the lease. A notice in the London Gazette at that time announced the bankruptcies, listing a former business interest of Frederick, then aged 26, and Douglas, two years his junior, as a builders and decorators called Barclay Brothers based at the Barclay family home.
Meanwhile, David was registered as a director of Hillgate Estate Agents in 1962, with his wife Zoe as a co-director (she had given up her modelling career to concentrate on her young sons, Aidan, Howard and Duncan). By 1968, however, Frederick was running the family businesses, replacing Zoe on the Hillgate board. He had obtained the discharge of his bankruptcy after David stepped in and paid the creditors. During this time they redeveloped old boarding houses in London, and made them into hotels.
Between 1968 and 1974, the twins received increasingly large loans from the Crown Agents, a government agency designed to help the colonies and developing countries do business in Britain. In 1970 they bought Gestplan Hotels — which operated the exclusive Londonderry House Hotel in Park Lane — from a group of Lebanese bankers. The property crash in late 1973 brought an end to the Crown Agents, and their debts were sold on at a fraction of the original price. In the mid-1970s Frederick met and married Hiroko Asada, née Kuzusaka, a familiar figure among Japanese society in London; she had a son from her previous marriage, Ko Asada.
From the late 1960s onwards the Barclay brothers continued to build up stakes in a variety of businesses, including breweries and casinos. In 1975, they bought the Howard Hotel, overlooking the Thames at Temple Place. In 1983 they bought Ellerman, the brewing and shipping group for £45m. They later sold its brewing division for £240m. They used the proceeds to buy the Ritz Hotel in London’s Piccadilly in 1995. They spent £370 million on Gotaas-Larsen, a Bermuda-based shipping company, and £200 million on the Automotive Financial Group, a motor retail chain in 1994. The brothers are involved in philanthropy and were knighted in 2000 for their support to medical research, to which they have donated an estimated forty million pounds between 1987 and 2000.
In 2004, they were listed in 42nd place with an estimate of £750m on the Sunday Times Rich List, and in 2006, they were ranked 24th with a value of £1,800m. The Barclay brothers’ fortune has shot up from £1bn in 2009 to £1.8bn in 2010. In 2012, they topped the Media Rich List with £2.25bn.
Source:wikipedia