13/10/2026
Private Eye: Lucky Jim
In the Money , Issue 1685
Gold Digger writes…
TAX exile Ineos boss Sir Jim Ratcliffe loves complaining about anything – from high energy prices to taxes – that doesn’t suit him. But he’s more forgetful about the British economic policies and fortuitous conditions that have bestowed vast riches on him.
State school and university-educated Ratcliffe’s petrochemicals empire originated in privatised BP’s Antwerp chemicals business in the 1990s. From there it grew on debt, capitalising on low interest rates to borrow billions of pounds to buy other assets from oil companies. The landmark acquisition was BP’s producer of olefins (used in fabric fibres) for £9bn in 2005.
Following the 2008 financial crisis and the onset of very low interest rates, the company made a series of investments and joint ventures to expand its oil refining business, notably at Grangemouth in Scotland.
Although it was paying a premium that put its debt in “junk bond” territory at the time, low prevailing rates meant it still managed to keep a lid on finance costs.
The strategy worked well for majority shareholder Ratcliffe and fellow directors John Reece and Andy Currie (19 percent each), as dividends began to spurt out of the corporate gusher to fund billionaire trappings such as Ratcliffe’s £130m superyacht.
While austerity had shafted the UK economy, the ultra-low interest rates needed to keep the economy afloat enabled the likes of Ratcliffe to borrow hard and cash in. In four years up to 2019, the Ineos Group Holdings group, which runs the core Ineos chemical products group, paid out dividends totalling €2.8bn – even as its expensive debts climbed to €8bn.
By now Ratcliffe and co held the group through a Luxembourg holding company, itself owned by a Swiss headquarters company and then ultimately an Isle of Man company.
The measure of this structure’s tax efficiency was that over a decade up to 2025, the group’s pre-tax profits ran to €11.4bn (after €0.6bn losses in 2025) while its corporate tax payments totalled €1.4bn. At a rate of 12.5 percent, this was more than eight percentage points below the average UK rate over the period.
Not that the tax-dodging stood in the way of a knighthood for Ratcliffe in 2018 – the same year that he rose to the top of the Sunday Times Rich List with an estimated worth of £21bn (he’s now ninth, with £15.2bn).
Monte Carlo or bust
After coming through Covid unscathed, the cash continued to pour out, although even more lightly taxed than previously in Ratcliffe’s case, following his less than patriotic move to Monaco in the spring of 2020. In three years to 2023, Ineos Group Holdings paid out €1.4bn in dividends, including €700m in the final year.
This was already looking extravagant, given that rising post-Ukraine invasion prices for the oil and gas that are Ineos’s core inputs were already swallowing profits (down from €2.3bn in 2022 to €400m in 2023).
Ratcliffe is now at pains to point to the effect of these pressures, plus higher energy costs (not helped by the Brexit he argued for). But hardly less important was the growing impact of rising interest rates in the wake of the twin curses of Covid and Liz Truss. By 2024, the Ineos group was paying €1.34bn in finance costs, as debt headed to €15bn, doubling from a decade earlier, and interest rates on its borrowings stretched to 7.5 percent.
Snoozy Quattro
Another part of Ineos, its speciality chemicals and plastics arm Ineos Quattro, is even more troubled. It lost €1bn last year (and €819m the year before) after finance costs of €803m, thanks to debts running above €7bn. Its bonds currently trade at yields around 13 percent.
Ratcliffe and co have stopped extracting dividends from this and the core group, which together make up the bulk of the $50bn- turnover Ineos empire, but the real price for his chosen path is being paid by others.
Two weeks ago, Ratcliffe announced he was suspending operations at three acetyls chemical plants in Hull because of energy costs; in January 2025 he closed an ethanol producing plant in Grangemouth, which was soon followed by the closure of the port’s Petroineos crude processing plant (a joint venture with Petrochina). Four hundred jobs were lost.
Yet, although you won’t hear it from Ratcliffe, wider events often work in his favour. Profits at the core group spiked dramatically to €750m in the first half of this year, thanks largely to an Iran war dividend as Asian competitors found their supply chains more adversely affected. Even the beleaguered Quattro arm’s losses narrowed in the most recent quarter to a mere €35m.
Yet Ratcliffe still has only gripes. Interviewed by BBC business editor Simon Jack last month (in Denmark, handily sparing him one of his few allowed days in the UK), he was still aggrieved about the 2020 freeze on fracking in the UK (shale gas is a big money-spinner for Ineos in the US).
This cost Ineos £250m, only a tenth of the core group’s profits the following year, and the project was always likely to fall foul of local concerns as the earth began to shake during trials. There was no time for the grumbling Ratcliffe to mention the £125m government support in late 2025 for Ineos to upgrade its remaining plant at Grangemouth.
Goal difference
In 2024, again using an Isle of Man company, Ratcliffe acquired what is now a 29 percent stake in Manchester United and, with it, executive control over football matters. The hope was that he would bring some commercial nous to a company with debts of more than £1bn of its own.
So far, he’s achieved little beyond upsetting fans and staff, not least with a 40 percent redundancy programme (450 staff) and cancelling perks such as free meals at the club’s training ground, while the team slides down the Premier League table. Doubtless that will be somebody else’s fault, too.
