Profile: Jim Ratcliffe, Britain’s most private billionaire

How Jim Ratcliffe, the Philip Green of the chemicals industry, became a bellwether of the private-equity boom...

Not many people have heard of Jim Ratcliffe, says Fiona Maharg Bravo on Breakingviews.com. Yet he "is to chemicals what Philip Green is to retail or Lakshmi Mittal is to steel": a highly successful entrepreneur who has built a multi-billion pound empire "using lashings of debt" in just seven years. Ratcliffe likes to keep a low profile. But as his Ineos Group prepares to complete its $9bn acquisition of BP's petrochemical and refining arm, "anonymity may no longer be an option" for Britain's most private billionaire.

Quiet panache

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.