Sir David Barclay, co-owner of the Daily Telegraph, has died at the age of 86.
Sir David, along with his twin brother Sir Frederick, formed a business empire that included hotels, retailers and the media.
Boris Johnson’s Tribute
His death was announced in the Telegraph, which it reported on Sunday after a short illness.
UK’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a former newspaper columnist, paid tribute to Sir David.
“Goodbye with respect and admiration to Sir David Barclay who saved a great newspaper, opened thousands of jobs across the UK and who was a staunch believer in the country’s freedom and what it could achieve,” he wrote on twitter.
The Barclay Brothers
The Barclay brothers, who had an estimated £ 7bn according to the 2020 edition of the Sunday Times Rich List, were known for their shyness in the media and rarely gave interviews.
Born in Hammersmith, west London, in 1934, Sir David was deeply moved by his memories of the war at a young age, and the death of his father when he was 12 years old.
He and his twin brother Frederick – who was 10 minutes younger – began as painters and decorators, before moving into the real estate and eventually into hotels.
Their success in real estate and hotels helped them take over Ellerman Lines, a shipping business with brewing interests, in 1983.
This provided a launch pad for where they would be billionaires.
Business Empire
On various occasions, their hotel portfolio has included a number of award-winning goods, including the Ritz Hotel in London, which they sold in March last year.
In 2012, the BBC’s Panorama reported that the Ritz had not paid any corporate taxes since it was taken over by Barclays in 1995.
At the time, Sir David said that “they had done the right thing in terms of taxation and had never participated in any tax evasion program.”
In 2015, the twins sold the Maybourne hospitality group, which included luxury hotels such as Claridges.
The brothers first ventured into media ownership with their 1992 purchase of The European, a pan-European newspaper that shut down in 1998.
They also bought The Scotsman in 1995 and Sunday Business in 1997.
“After these ventures in the publishing arena, the brothers had nurtured since the 1980s an ambition to own the Telegraph group,” The Telegraph said.
They won the Telegraph Group in 2004 for £ 665m from Canadian communications company Conrad Black’s group Hollinger.
The brothers also owned a number of retail outlets, including Shop Direct, a major fashion retailer and real estate company Yodel.
The pair were knighted in 2000 for services to charity. By this point their foundation was thought to have donated about £40m to charity and medical research.
The notoriously private twins’ relationship was the subject of an extraordinary legal case last year, in which Sir David’s three sons were accused by his brother of bugging conversations at the Ritz Hotel, which they previously owned.
In its press release the Telegraph reported that Sir David had been a stubborn student, who loved the press, business, economics and politics, and always claimed to have studied at the “university of life”.
