The billionaire British hedge fund manager Sir Chris Hohn paid himself $346m (£276m) this year – more than £1m for every working day.
However, the payout from his TCI hedge fund, where Rishi Sunak worked between 2006 and 2009, is half the £574m Hohn collected a year earlier.
The dividend payment was reduced to reflect a 48% decline in pre-tax profits at TCI Fund Management to $371m in the year to February 2023 but is still 8,000 times the average UK salary and about 1,700 times that collected by Sunak as prime minister.
The £276m payment works out at £1.1m for every working day of the year. Accounts filed at Companies House on Thursday show the money was paid to another company controlled by Hohn. It is understood Hohn reinvested the windfall in the Children’s Investment (TCI).
Hohn, the son of a legal secretary and a Jamaican-born car mechanic who emigrated to Britain in the 1960s, set up TCI in 2003 and has built up a personal fortune of more than $6.2bn, making him the 405th richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index.
He would be far richer if he had not given so much money to charity. Earlier this year he was named “the UK’s most generous man” by the Sunday Times rich list, which reported that his Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) charity had given away £755m in 2021.
However, CIFF charitable giving reduced to £390m in 2022, according to accounts filed with the Charity Commission, as the value of its investment portfolio dropped from $5.9bn to $5bn.
The TCI hedge fund donated $26m to CIFF last year and $52.5m to Hohn’s newer charity the CH Foundation (UK).
He set up CH Foundation (UK) after his divorce from Jamie Cooper, with whom he co-founded CIFF. After the divorce, the supreme court ruled that CIFF must make a £277m donation to his ex-wife’s charity, Big Win Philanthropy.
Hohn, who has only given a handful of tightly controlled media interviews throughout his career, pleaded with the high court judge overseeing his 2014 divorce to ban the media from the courtroom.
However, the request was denied, giving the public a glimpse into the billionaire’s surprisingly modest lifestyle, his motivations for making so much money and why he did not view his wife of 17 years as worthy of half of the family fortune.
Although he was in a fight over a huge amount of money, Hohn said his life’s mission was to give money away. “My life is actually about charity,” he told the court. “I learned very early on you cannot take money with you. It does not bring you happiness.”
He is the biggest single donor to Extinction Rebellion, saying in 2019: “I recently gave them £50,000 because humanity is aggressively destroying the world with climate change and there is an urgent need for us all to wake up to this fact.” His charity is thought to have pledged a further £150,000.
TCI, which is based in a Mayfair townhouse a couple of doors down from Louis Vuitton’s store, is ultimately owned by a parent company in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven.
Hohn told the Sunday Times in May: “I’ve come to the conclusion that, while all the work I do is important, one of the most important things is this spiritual education. We have to solve the problem of selfishness in society.”
