The billionaire hedge fund manager Sir Chris Hohn paid himself a record-breaking $690m (£574m) this year after his Children’s Investment (TCI) fund recorded a a surge in profits.
The payout from the Mayfair-based hedge fund, where the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, worked between 2006 and 2009, is the biggest ever collected by Hohn and believed to be the highest annual amount ever paid to one person in Britain. It equates to more than £1.5m a day.
The dividend payment from TCI Fund Management is 15,000 times the average UK salary, and is about 3,500 times that collected by Sunak as PM. Accounts filed at Companies House on Tuesday show the money was paid to another company controlled by Hohn. It is understood that Hohn reinvested the windfall in TCI.
The sum for the year to the end of February is up from $152m the previous year, and up from a previous record of $479m the year before that. A spokesperson for the company did not respond to requests for comment.
The High Pay Centre’s Luke Hildyard, who campaigns against excessive executive pay, called for higher taxes on top earners such as Hohn. “Hedge fund profits come from the corporations they invest in and the fees charged to their super-rich clients,” he said.
“It would be easy for policymakers to get corporations and the super-rich to pay their staff more and pay a bit more tax, meaning much of this £575m would be going to support the incomes of ordinary workers or fund vital public services instead.”
Hohn, the son of a Jamaican car mechanic who emigrated to Britain in the 1960s, set up TCI in 2003 and has built up a personal fortune of more than $8.2bn, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index.
Hohn and TCI are known for running aggressive campaigns for change at companies they invest in. Earlier this month he called on Google’s owner Alphabet to take “aggressive action” on costs. “The company has too many employees and the cost per employee is too high,” he said in a public letter.
The fund is famous for its campaign against Dutch bank ABN Amro, which led to its sale to Royal Bank of Scotland, seen as a key reason for RBS’s near collapse during the financial crisis.
The hedge fund, which is based in a Mayfair townhouse a couple of doors down from Louis Vuitton’s flagship store, is ultimately owned by a parent company in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven.
Hohn is also one of the UK’s biggest philanthropists, and has pumped more than £4bn into his personal children’s charity. In recent years he has also taken on the cause of the climate crisis, promising to use his fund’s $35bn of investments to “force change on companies who refuse to take their environmental emissions seriously”.
He is the biggest single donor to Extinction Rebellion on account of the “urgent need” for people to wake up to the climate emergency. “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,” Hohn said in 2019. His charity is thought to have pledged a further £150,000.
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 from Jamie Cooper-Hohn 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 didn’t 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 said he lived a “very simple lifestyle”, avoids meat and practices yoga. On hearing the evidence, the judge noted that the couple lived a “Swatch lifestyle” not a “jet-set lifestyle”.
Hohn, who grew up in Addlestone, Surrey, said he first decided to give money to charity while working in the Philippines, where he had seen children living on a rubbish dump.
“I considered being a doctor and working in a caring profession,” Hohn, 54, told the court. “[But] a dream or aspiration without resources is just that.” He compared his ambition to become a philanthropist to other young people who set their hearts on being able to “play for Chelsea or be a top QC”.
