Jim Ratcliffe on saving Manchester United and buying parts of Iceland

Against a backdrop of Icelandic mountains shaped like tents and mushrooms and capped with snow, Jim Ratcliffe is standing in a freezing river. He flicks his fly-fishing rod a few times and gazes around at the scenery. “There are some things money can’t buy,” he says with a sigh. In fact, he has bought it. The industrialist, sports team owner, mountaineer, beekeeper and now conservationist has snapped up 400,000 acres of wilderness here in the Land of Fire and Ice with the aim of preserving it against developers. What he means is that money can’t buy the solitude and tranquillity.

Just 25 miles from the Arctic Circle, our only companions are a few reindeer on the grasslands and, in the mountain rivers, shoals of Atlantic salmon. “This is one of the world’s last great unspoilt areas and it’s unique,” he says. It was the salmon that first drew Ratcliffe here two decades ago. “I came across this place through serendipity, really, when I came for my 50th birthday. As a kid I fished in the lakes and canals in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Nowadays, the only rivers that are worth fishing are in places that are remote because if there are any people around there are no fish.”

Ratcliffe, the founder of the petrochemical giant Ineos, was fourth on The Sunday Times Rich List this year with an estimated net worth of £23.519 billion. At 71 he might be mistaken for Felix Happer, the fictional oil and gas tycoon in the 1983 film Local Hero. Happer, played by Burt Lancaster, buys up a Scottish glen so he can watch the night sky, free from light pollution. In Ratcliffe’s case, he wants to commune with nature and go fly-fishing — on a strictly catch-and-return basis. “All the intensity of everyday life where everything is covered in concrete or tarmac and you’re umbilically attached to your iPhone disappears very quickly in this environment,” he says. “It will be good for my longevity, I hope.”

I once mentioned to him that I’d done a bit of fishing, so he invited me to stop by if I’m in the area, which turns out to be not so straightforward. A flight to Reykjavik, the Icelandic capital, then another by turboprop to Egilsstadir on the opposite side of the island, then miles by car on lonely roads to the windswept north coast, where the great meltwater rivers empty into the sea. Then upstream on gravel tracks towards the salmon spawning grounds to a wooden fishing lodge he’s recently built. And there’s Sir Jim’s Airbus H145 helicopter — chartered for the final leg of the journey, the type used for special forces training and registered to a private operator on the Isle of Man. Clearly his journey was speedier than mine.

Dressed in camo jacket and waders, he doesn’t look like a typical boardroom mogul. He’s craggy and lean from running and cycling — at a towering 6ft 4in, the miles are etched on his face like Mount Rushmore — and he still works a seven-day week.

Earlier this year he beat some of the world’s toughest bidders, including wealth funds and potentates, to secure a 27.7 per cent stake in his beloved Manchester United, the football club he has supported since he was a child growing up in a council house in the Manchester suburb of Failsworth. He has vowed to restore it to its former sporting glory. He owns a third of the Mercedes Formula 1 team, whose lead driver, Lewis Hamilton, was back on winning form on July 28 at the Spa circuit in Belgium (his 201st podium), and the Ineos Grenadiers cycling squad, which finished fourth in the team rankings of the Tour de France last month. This month, the Ineos Britannia sailing team will begin its attempt on the America’s Cup.

Now Ratcliffe has joined the handful of international wealthy elite who’ve bought up huge tracts of the planet’s unspoilt areas: Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, in New Zealand; Jeff Bezos, boss of Amazon, in Texas; Mark Zuckerberg, head of Meta, in Hawaii; and the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, in Nebraska and elsewhere.

Some may conclude he’s seeking atonement. It’s no secret that part of his fortune is from “fracking and cracking” — drilling for oil and gas and processing it for household products. When he first started buying chunks of Iceland, some locals feared a deep-water port for ocean-going tankers or a refinery might follow.

But Ratcliffe wasn’t interested in the coast, more the spawning grounds, which he has promised to protect. The world’s population of Atlantic salmon has dropped catastrophically — by three quarters since the 1970s according to some estimates — to a few million fish today.

“The Atlantic salmon is one of the most magnificent species on the planet and it’s highly endangered,” he says. “There are very few left in the world because of human interference. It starts life in the river, goes out to sea and feeds for a couple of seasons, then comes back as a fully grown mature salmon. Unfortunately for the salmon, it spends half its life in a freshwater environment based on land, which is where humans exist, so it’s having a tough time.”

He shows me a spot called Prince Charles’s Pool — a favourite haunt of the King when he was a young man, as depicted in the Netflix series The Crown. Charles was fishing here in 1979 when he received news that Lord Mountbatten had been killed by an IRA bomb. Ratcliffe has a plan for the monarch to visit and rechristen the section of river King Charles’s Pool.

He’s encouraging other sports fishermen to visit. As part of his conservation plan, fish are tagged and released to help marine biologists find out why numbers have been falling. “You have to allow catch-and-release fishing because you need an income for the farmers who can’t survive on farming alone,” he says. “But you can reduce the intensity by limiting the number [of anglers] and the number of fish people can catch.”

His company slogan is Grit, Rigour and Humour and he does his best to lead by example, he says. His restless energy is evident from his résumé. He graduated with a 2:1 in chemical engineering from the University of Birmingham in 1974, and then trained as an accountant. He studied for an MBA while employed by Exxon, then worked for Courtaulds, a UK fabric and chemicals manufacturer. In 1989 he joined the Boston-based venture capital firm Advent International, then struck out on his own.

He formed Ineos in Hampshire in 1998 to acquire the freehold of a chemicals site in Antwerp. Thanks to a knack for buying up unloved companies from the likes of BP and ICI and making them profitable, Ineos ballooned into a global conglomerate — or, as he puts it, “the biggest company in the world you’ve never heard of”. Today, Ineos supplies everything from food packaging and pharmaceuticals to the plastic in Lego, with 26,000 employees and sales that match the GDP of a medium-sized country.

Ratcliffe was knighted for services to business in 2018 and topped The Sunday Times Rich List the same year.

Despite being a staunch Brexiteer, he came out in support of Keir Starmer shortly before last month’s general election, saying: “I like Keir. I think he’ll do a very sensible job.” He despairs, however, at the inability of Britain’s politicians to see beyond the five-year election cycle. As a result, they “lurch from one crisis to another”.

In 2010 he moved Ineos to Switzerland after a corporate spat with the UK Inland Revenue over a VAT bill. The headquarters are now in Knightsbridge in London — but Britain’s cities are not as safe as they once were, he says. “I can’t wear a watch in London, and I just need to be a bit wary, a bit careful.” A fatal mugging on the pavement outside his offices was captured on Ineos’s CCTV system. “He died in a pool of blood because somebody tried to take his Rolex and he resisted. About a year ago we had three guys in hoodies, with machetes, right outside the office, opposite Harrods.”

A rise in robbery and shoplifting is one example of what Ratcliffe sees as a failure by the authorities to provide basic services, including public safety. He sees declines in health and prisons. “We don’t have enough prison space. I mean, this didn’t just happen. We’ve been talking about the prisons being overcrowded for ten years.”

Britain, he says, faces a looming energy shortage, exacerbated by Labour’s ban on North Sea oil and gas exploration and by the shutdown of Britain’s older nuclear power stations. Paradoxically, Ratcliffe’s company stands to profit. Ineos’s tankers ship liquefied gas from the US to the UK. His fleet is already enjoying a bonanza and imports are set to rise to cover the shortfall. But high energy costs are stifling growth, he warns. “Americans pay a third of what we do for gas, and a fifth for electricity,” he says. “That’s why their economy is going gangbusters and ours has stalled.” Further price hikes will force belt-tightening in the UK and Europe, and make their citizens poorer.

He’s not talking about economic meltdown or Armageddon, but it sounds like a good enough reason to look for a refuge at the top of the world.

When he’s not in Iceland he divides his time between Britain, Switzerland and Monaco, keeping business plates spinning while on the move. He’s not a fan of working from home, however. “WFH is a bit of an oxymoron. We bought one company in Sweden and we could see from the email traffic alone that on the days people worked from home their productivity halved. I don’t encourage it.”

He has a house on the shores of Lake Geneva and has just finished building a beach house on seven acres on the shores of the Solent estuary in Hampshire, where he keeps his beehives — five of them. “It’s a lovely spot, next to an SSSI [site of special scientific interest], and I can swim every day.”

Hampshire still feels like his spiritual home, he says. So much so, he named his superyachts Hampshire I and II (he sold the first to Andy Currie, one of his Ineos business partners). But he is clearly laying roots in Iceland too, building himself a lodge — reportedly with nine bedrooms — overlooking a valley with a salmon stream at the bottom of his garden. He’ll spend time here when it gets too hot in Monaco, then return to the Mediterranean in the winter.

Standing in a chilly river waiting for an elusive fish to bite may not be everyone’s idea of fun, but to sports fishermen the thrill is in the pursuit — man versus fish. “You never know what’s gonna happen,” Ratcliffe enthuses. “Whether you’re going to catch a fish, whether it’s going be a great fish, or whether you’re going to lose it. I don’t know what it is. I think it’s deep in our psyche — [hunting] is still there in our DNA.”

He casts a fly — a Sunray, for any fisherfolk out there — onto the surface of the Sela river and waits. And waits. Conditions are not ideal. The water is high from the late season snowmelt and the churned-up sediment makes it harder for the fish to see the fly. He tries a bigger fly and then we take a tea break, sitting on the tailgate of his Grenadier, the all-terrain vehicle made by Ineos’s automotive division. He’s brought half a dozen of them to Iceland, where they’re at home in the rocky terrain.

As we wait for water to boil on a camping stove our conversation turns to cycling injuries, not unlike that scene in Jaws where Robert Shaw shows off his shark bites. I’m Richard Dreyfuss, with only one fracture and a few bruises. He shows me on his phone an x-ray of a huge metal pin running through his femur, the aftermath of a serious crash during a cycling race in Italy, and easily the biggest bone repair I’ve seen. Another x-ray shows a lattice of wires in his shoulder, also caused by a cycling misadventure.

Most of the world’s other remote places Ratcliffe has already explored. He’s crossed the spine of the Andes from the Atacama desert in northern Chile to Tierra del Fuego in the southern tip on a motorcycle and ridden across vast tracts of Africa, breaking three bones in his foot. He’s navigated the Northwest Passage, dodging icebergs in his explorer vessel, Sherpa, with only seals and polar bears for company for weeks. He’s towed a sledge to the North and South poles, arriving at the latter on the centenary of Amundsen’s historic expedition in 1911.

“Never again,” he vows. “It’s just unrelenting misery in minus 40, pulling a heavy sled over ice waves on rickety old skis, freezing to death.”

He has climbed the Matterhorn, run across the Sahara in the Marathon des Sables, the world’s toughest foot race, and completed an Ironman triathlon, aged 64, in just 14 hours and 44 minutes.

A keen endurance runner — he ran the London marathon in April — Ratcliffe says one of his most joyful moments was helping Eliud Kipchoge, one of the greatest marathon runners of all time, smash the two-hour barrier in 2019. Kipchoge, who was funded by Ineos, ran 26.2 miles through the streets of Vienna in 1:59:40. “Moments of elation are not something you experience very often in any other walks of life [but] in sport you get these peaks of emotion,” he says. “I mean, the moment when Kipchoge crossed the line to beat the two-hour marathon, I was in tears.”

On some adventures he is accompanied by his two sons, Sam and George, both in their thirties, from his ten-year marriage in 1985 to Amanda Townson, and his teenage daughter, Julia, from a later relationship with Maria Alessia Maresca, an Italian tax lawyer. He is now in a relationship with Catherine Polli, a Monaco-based banker.

Taking part-ownership of Manchester United at the start of this year was the fulfilment of a lifelong dream and the number one item on his bucket list. The year-long negotiations were a bit like landing a salmon, he jokes, requiring “enormous patience — it was on the line for a long time”.

He had wanted to own the club outright but his ambitions were diluted to a minority stake. Instead of “first refusal”, which would put him in pole position to extend his holding if the majority-stakeholding Glazer family decide to sell, he’s got a weaker “first offer” option. Was he happy with the deal?

“I think we tried and tried many, many different permutations to do a transaction with the Glazer family, and for one reason or another [each] had their challenges or obstacles so in the end we did the deal that we could do. At the end of the day, in my view, the key thing is to just have a good relationship with the other owners, which are the Glazer family — the six siblings. You know, they’re really good people. And they are passionate about the club. The key is not the legal agreements. The key is that we have common objectives, which are to see Manchester United be successful, and that we trust each other.”

Ratcliffe controls the day-to-day management and — crucially — the sporting side of the business. He says he feels the weight of history on his shoulders. “Manchester United has the biggest fanbase of any football club in the world, probably the biggest of any sports team in the world. They say about 10 or 12 per cent of the planet are either Manchester United fans or sympathisers, which is getting close to a billion people. It is a colossal enterprise.”

He says the club had “clearly lost its way. I mean, the results speak for themselves. In the last ten or eleven years, it should have been a contender for the Premier League and Champions League [trophies] every year and it hasn’t at all. It is a big responsibility to return the club to where it should be. It should be performing at least in the top eight in Europe. Now if we can’t do that then we won’t have been successful.”

Ratcliffe is keeping a video diary for a future documentary, as yet untitled. So far, the most senior management have left by “mutual consent”, he says. “We’ve got some very good people and some fresh faces.” The new arrivals include Omar Berrada, the chief executive, Roger Bell, chief financial officer, and a new sporting director, Dan Ashworth, poached from Newcastle United. He rejects suggestions that his shake-up went too far. “You can’t put your head in the sand, you have to face facts. It needed a fresh start, so that’s what we’ve done.”

His “clean sweep” did not extend to Erik ten Hag, the team’s manager, a decision that surprised some. “Erik is a good guy and had been doing his best, but doing too much. He was trying to sort out the squad and fix leaks in the roof at the same time.”

Ratcliffe says the club’s high turnover of managers since the departure of Alex Ferguson in 2013, including the sacking of talents such as José Mourinho in 2018 before the end of a three-year contract, suggested the problems lay at a more senior level. “What happened is that Alex Ferguson and David Gill [the former managing director] left at the same time, 11 years ago. Up until that point, those two had been managing the sports side of the club and the Glazer family had managed the commercial side very well. And then all of a sudden there’s this vacuum.”

He’s already stumped up tens of millions for much-needed renovations at Old Trafford. As part of the refurbishments, the women’s squad were relocated to portable cabins to make way for the men’s first team — a move that drew criticism. Ratcliffe described the arrangement as “pragmatic” and lasting only while work was carried out at the Carrington training centre, adding: “The men’s team make £800 million, the women’s team cost £10 million.” An Ineos spokesman said: “We’ve invested £10 million in the women’s facility and they will be back as soon as the £50 million revamp of Carrington is complete.”

At a time in life when most people would be easing back, Ratcliffe appears to be putting his foot on the throttle. He’s just sunk €4 billion (£3.4 billion) into a chemical plant —an ethane gas cracker — in Antwerp and he’s ploughing $20 billion into a joint venture that will build petrochemical complexes in Beijing and Shanghai. His other businesses include the Lime Wood hotel in Hampshire and the Portetta hotel in Courchevel.

He insists retirement is a long way off. “What you don’t want to do — not me anyway — is settle down in an armchair and say goodbye to life. I don’t want to get to that point. I enjoy life as it is at the moment.”

Ratcliffe’s acquisition of land in Iceland and promise to conserve it has been welcomed by some locals, who see it as a buffer against other would-be purchasers. The country’s supply of cheap geothermal and hydro energy is attracting new industries at a rapid pace. Metal producers have moved in to carry out aluminium smelting; Bitcoin miners have set up huge datacentres to “dig” for cryptocurrency. Giant open-net fish farms have sprung up along the coastline.

“I love that area,” says Kat Olafsson, a delivery driver who makes drop-offs to the coastal village of Vopnafjordur. “My dad used to fish there and we used to go with him to see the reindeer. It doesn’t matter who owns it — the government or someone else — as long as it stays as it is.”

But not everyone has welcomed Ratcliffe. In 2017 Iceland Magazine reported he had “risen to become the largest landowner in Iceland”, adding: “He has not revealed what he paid.” Accounts from a holding company called Halicilla suggest Ratcliffe spent £39 million acquiring the land and the angling rights on six rivers in the wild northeast: the Sela, Hofsa, Hafralonsa, Sunnudalsa, Midfjardara and Vesturdalsa. Ratcliffe responded by telling RUV, the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service, his goal was to protect the rivers and strengthen the salmon population.

The Icelandic government has moved to cap the amount of land non-Icelanders can acquire in future. Is he the country’s biggest landowner? He’s not sure. Does he know of anyone who owns more than his 400,000 acres? “Possibly the church,” he says.

His not-for-profit Six Rivers Foundation is installing salmon ladders to enable fish to reach stretches of river previously inaccessible to them and releasing young fish upstream. There are signs that the population is starting to recover in this remote corner. He is planting trees too — half a million a year, with plans to double that. Will this help reduce the €200 million (£169 million) a year his petrochemicals company pays in carbon tax? “There may be some offset possibility but it will be very modest and will have very little impact on the carbon tax bill,” an Ineos spokesman says.

It’s really all about the salmon. We’ve left the Sela river without a bite and we’re heading for the Bear Pool on the Hofsa, where the torrent slows and the river widens into a rippling pond. Time is running out but we might be lucky, he grins. “You can expect to catch a one-metre salmon only once in a lifetime in Iceland, but anything over 90cm is a triumph,” he tells me.

He strides back into the current and casts downstream. Before long there’s a tug on the line, and patiently he hauls in the biggest salmon I’ve ever seen — a 93cm fish. Gingerly he unhooks it and sits on the bank for a photo, then watches it swim away. “A beauty,” he says, proudly. No wonder they call him Lucky Jim.