Billionaire Duke of Westminster banks £37.7m as Grosvenor pays rare dividend
The billionaire Duke of Westminster – who owns swathes of London’s Mayfair and Belgravia – added another £37.7 million to his enormous wealth last year as his Grosvenor Estates property empire paid its first dividend since 2010.
Gerald Grosvenor, the 6th Duke of Westminster, has an estimated £8.6 billion fortune, making him the UK’s ninth richest man according to the Sunday Times Rich List.
The payout looks set to be the first of many.
Financial director Nick Scarles said “There’s an ethos that well-run companies really should pay dividends. It’s a good discipline to have.”
He added: “To preserve the discipline we might expect it to increase slightly over time but this is a nice place to start from.”
The results came as the company - whose London assets form part of a £6 billion property business worldwide - posted record pre-tax profits of £681.8 million in 2014, well ahead of the £506.9 million seen the previous year.
Revenue profits, stripping out the impact of currencies and property revaluations, were £80.1 million.
This was down on an exceptional 2013, when Grosvenor called the top of the luxury London property to sell off £240 million of super-prime developments, but is also a steady increase on the preceding years.
Chief executive Mark Preston said: “What has happened in the market subsequently has vindicated that decision and indeed the timing of it was good.”
Grosvenor - which has a £5.5 billion development pipeline - is still concerned about the prospects for a correction in some markets, including China and “parts of the UK”, according to Scarles.
But Preston also stressed the group’s diverse interests in Asia and the UK and a £1.1 billion buffer of unused financial capacity against further turbulence.
Preston criticised Labour’s plans for rental controls, saying previous attempts to intervene “haven’t proved at all effective”.
He also said the mansion tax proposals would have a “noticeable impact” but called for a longer term approach from both parties.
“We’ve got to look at the supply - bringing forward land, looking at the planning system. There are also skills shortages and materials shortages preventing us from bringing things on.”
The company traces its history back to 1677, when the present Duke’s ancestor, Sir Thomas Grosvenor, married Mary Davies, who had inherited 500 acres of land north of the Thames to the west of the City of London.
The Grosvenors developed the northern part — now known as Mayfair — in the 1720s before moving south to Belgravia.
