Sunday Times Rich List 2022: release date, publication date and who are the 10 wealthiest people in London?

The Sunday Times Rich List has been released for 2022, with the wealthiest people in the United Kingdom announced.

Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, made his debut in the list, less than two days after warning people of a financially ‘tough’ few months ahead.

The list has also revealed that the 10 billionaires in Scotland all saw their wealth grow over the last year, with economies recovering after the pandemic.

The list was released on Friday 20 May, 2022 and will be published in The Sunday Times newspaper on May 22, 2022.

What is the Sunday Times Rich List?

The Sunday Times Rich List is a list of the top 1,000 wealthiest people, or families with residency in the UK. The list is usually updated annually in April and has been published by The Sunday Times since 1989.

The list is not limited to just British citizens, and will include individuals or families that were born overseas, but predominantly work or live in Britain.

Who are the top 10 wealthiest people or families in London?

• Sri and Gopi Hinduja and family - 2022 wealth: £28.472bn 

Gopi Hinduja is based in London, as is spearheading his family’s move into electric vehicles. His son, Dheeraj, oversees their Leeds based company which is developing a new fleet of zero-emission buses, vans and trucks.

Around £300 million is being put into the new start up, which aims to create around 4,000 jobs across India and the UK.

• David and Simon Reuben and family - 2022 wealth: £22.265bn 

The Reuben brothers, who were born in India, recently teamed up with Saudi investors and Amanda Staveley to purchase Newcastle United from Mike Ashley, with the Reubens holding a 10 percent stake in the Premier League side.

David’s son Jamie is also serving as a director of Newcastle.

Simon started out in carpets and managed to buy England’s oldest carpet company, J Holdsworth, giving him the springboard to start investing in property.

• Sir Leonard Blavatnik - 2022 wealth: £20bn

Sir Leonard Blavatnik is a business magnate and philanthropist, who has long held both UK and US citizenship. He made his fortune in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and now owns most of Warner Music Group.

He is also the chairman, president and founder of Access Industries Holdings, which he founded in 1986.

• Guillaume Pousaz - 2022 wealth: £19.259bn 

The 40-year-old set up Checkout.com, which simplifies payment processes for businesses including Deliveroo and Netflix, meaning millions have used his services without possibly even knowing.

The London based business is worth around £29.6 billion, with Pousaz owning 65 percent of the shares.

• Lakshmi Mittal and family - 2022 wealth: £17bn

Lakshmi Mittal is the executive chairman of ArcelorMittal, which is the world’s largest steelmaking company. Aside from steelmaking, he holds a 20 percent stake in English second-tier side, Queen’s Park Rangers.

The 71-year-old is also a member of the board of director Goldman Sachs, a position held since 2008.

• Guy, George, Alannah and Galen Weston and family - 2022 wealth: £13.5bn

The family’s move into business can be traced back to 1884, when George Weston purchased a bakery in Toronto, Canada.

Just prior to Christmas 2021, the family sold Selfirdges for around £5bn, with the global coronavirus pandemic, and the subsequent drop is high street spenders believed to be the catalyst behind the sale.

The main holding company of the British branch of the family is ‘Wittington Investments’, which owns a majority stake in Associated British Foods, which in itself owns Primark.

• Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken and Michel de Carvalho - 2022 wealth: £11.421bn 

The Dutch native owns a 25% percent stake in Dutch brewer Heineken which is the world’s second largest brewer in the world. She is also an executive director of Heineken.

She was the only daughter of Freddy Heineken, and inherited £3bn when he passed away in 2002. Freddy’s grandfather, Gerard Adriaan bought Heineken in 1864.

Charlene currently resides in London with her husband, Michel, a financier and director of Citigroup and their five children. The couple met when Charlene was on a ski trip in St Moritz.

• Michael Platt - 2022 wealth: £10bn

Michael Platt is a billionaire hedge fund manager, who was born in Preston in 1968.

He is the co-founder and managing director BlueCrest Capital Manager. The hedge fund is the third-largest in Europe, and he co-founded it in 2000.

His investment career began back in 1982, when he was just 14. He invested £500 in a shipping line, Common Brothers, which soon tripled in price.

• The Duke of Westminster and the Grosvenor family - 2022 wealth: £9.726bn

Hugh Grosvenor, the 7th Duke of Westminster is a British Aristocrat, billionaire, businessman and the owner of the Grosvenor group.

The 31-year-old was previously the world’s richest person under the age of 30, and he has been the Duke of Westminster since 2016, when his father passed away.

When his father passed, he inherited around £9bn.

In 2013, after graduating from university, the then-Earl worked in estate management at Wheatsheaf Investment from 2013 to 2014, Grosvenor Group from 2014 to 2015, before becoming Accounts Manager at the energy company Bio-bean in January 2016.

He is the godfather to Prince George of Cambridge and donated several million pounds in response to the Covid-19 pandemic in April 2020.

• Marit, Lisbet, Sigrid and Hans Rausing - 2022 wealth: £9.49bn

The Rausing family rank 15th overall in the UK rich list, and are the 10th wealthiest family in London.

Marit Rausing is the widow of Hans Rausing, who built up the Tetra Pak packaging business founded by his father in 1944, which revolutionised the packaging of products such as milk and juices.

They moved to Britain in the 1980s to escape Sweden’s higher tax regime, and the family owns a 960-acre estate in East Sussex, Aubrey House in Holland Park and the Coignafearn estate in the Scottish Highlands.

The family shot into the news around a decade ago, when Eva, the first wife of the Rausing’s son Hans Kristian, died of a drug overdose.

Her body lay undiscovered at their London mansion for two months and Hans Kristian later received a 10-month suspended sentence for preventing her burial.

Who is the wealthiest person or family in the United Kingdom?

It is Sri and Gopi Hinduja who are the richest people in the UK. They top the list, and with their fortune being at around £25bn, it is the largest recorded on the rich list since its inception over 30 years ago.

How does the Sunday Times calculate the wealth of an individual or family in the UK?

On the Sunday Times website, they say: “We measure identifiable wealth, whether land, property, racehorses, art or significant shares in publicly quoted companies. We exclude bank accounts to which we have no access and small shareholdings in a private equity portfolio.”

This article originally listed Christoph Henkel and family in the list, with a net worth of £15bn. However since the original publication, the Sunday Times has moved Christoph Henkel down to 18th in the overall Rich List, with a net worth of £8.3bn, which means he has moved out of the list of 10 wealthiest people in London. The newspaper said in a statement: “We have changed our assessment of the Henkel’s wealth since the publication of this Rich List in May 2022 because the family own a smaller proportion of the company’s shares than we had previously understood.”