PA
A man dubbed the ‘migrant hotel king’ after receiving millions of pounds a day in government contracts to transport and accommodate asylum seekers has been named among the 350 richest people in the UK.
Graham King, the founder and majority owner of a business empire that includes Clearsprings Ready Homes, recently won a 10-year Home Office contract believed to be worth a whopping £3.5 million a day.
It has contributed to his £750 million fortune that puts him alongside King Charles III, the prime minister and Sir Paul McCartney on the Sunday Times rich list of the wealthiest people.
King branched out from running caravan parks after a disco he ran lost its license and he spotted a gap in the market, turning the building – a former cinema – to house refugees instead.
Since launching his property firm, Clearspings, in 1999, King has won a series of lucrative government contracts to provide short-term accommodation, mostly for asylum seekers.
Surging numbers of refugees more than doubled the firm’s profits to £62.5 million for the year ending January 2023. King has a 97 per cent stake in the firm.
Despite the government’s vow to crack down on the amount of money spent on asylum hotels, it is still paying Clearsprings more than £3.5 million a day through two contracts.
Almost all of the firm’s £1.3billion revenues in 2022 came from the ten-year contracts with the Home Office to house arrivals.
The Sunday Times Rich list has revealed that the richest 350 individuals and families together hold a combined wealth of £795 billion – a sum larger than the annual GDP of Poland.
Meanwhile, the personal fortune of Rishi Sunak and his wife, Akshata Murty, has increased by £120 million to an estimated £651 million in the run-up to the next general election, the list reveals.
Priya Sahni-Nicholas, a co-executive director of the Equality Trust, a charity that campaigns for the creation of a fairer society, said the list “demonstrates the obscene extent of inequality” in the UK.
“Billionaire wealth is up by more than 1,000 per cent since 1990 at a very real cost to us all,” she said. “This rich list is built off record bill increases, massive price hikes for essentials, an endless shortage of decent homes, and huge investment in fossil fuels.
“To make progress on these crises we must tackle inequality. The super-rich have spent centuries diverting wealth into their hands, making our democracy less responsive to people’s needs and damaging our communities. The result is we are poorer, sicker, less productive, unhappier, more polarised, and less trusting.”
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