Peter de Savary
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Peter John de Savary (born 11 July 1944) is an English entrepreneur and a former Chairman of Millwall F.C.
In the 1999 Sunday Times Rich List, he was placed in 971st place with an estimated fortune of £21 million, but was not listed in the top 1,000 places in subsequent editions.
Contents |
[edit] Biography
De Savary built his first business in Nigeria through contacts he made back home in England. The bulk of his business career has been spent in the shipping and oil sectors; he once owned or managed 13 shipyards around the globe, still retaining one shipyard in the United Kingdom, and he still has a global oil-trading and refueling business.
[edit] Clubs and property
His first venture into the hospitality was the St. James' Clubs in the late 1970s, in Los Angeles, London, Paris and Antigua, which he sold in the late 1980s to finance the £4m purchase of Skibo Castle.
De Savary built up a large business empire in the 1980s, with property interests including Land's End and John o' Groats.[1]
However, in the early 1990s economic downturn his empire collapsed with serious debts – he sold both Land's End and John o' Groats in 1991 for an undisclosed sum to businessman Graham Ferguson Lacey, and 14 of his companies were wound up between 1992 and 1994, with a combined shortfall to creditors of £715 million.[2]
[edit] 2000s
His recent business activities have concentrated on property development and hotels, with a number of major country house hotels incorporating golf courses. De Savary saw a niche for the affluent; leisure properties that were small enough to make guests feel as thought they were on their own private estate, but equipped with all the facilities of the world's great hotels. His first such development was The Carnegie Club at Skibo Castle in Scotland, the venue for Madonna and Guy Ritchie's wedding. Other similar developments have included: the Cherokee Plantation in South Carolina; Stapleford Park and Bovey Castle, both in England; and Carnegie Abbey in Rhode Island. Each is a private club with golf courses and other amenities—clay pigeon shooting, falconry, horseback riding, tennis—depending on what fits with the club's local environment.
[edit] Yachting
He led the British sailing team in its challenge for the America's Cup in 1983 but his contender Victory 83 was beaten by Australia II in the heats.
He used the Clyde-built tug MV St. Eval, launched in 1929, as a support vessel for the America's Cup races, but has since sold the ship. He also once owned the luxury yacht MY Land's End.
[edit] Football
In November 2005 he succeeded Theo Paphitis as Chairman of Millwall Holdings plc (AIM: MWH) and as Chairman of Millwall F.C. Stewart Till succeeded him on 3 May 2006 as the football club Chairman, and de Savary remained as Chairman of Millwall Holdings plc until October 2006.
[edit] Personal life
De Savary is married with five daughters. Two are from his first marriage – Lisa, who has provided him with his first grandchildren; Nicola, who is a doctor. His second wife is Lana, from Charleston, South Carolina, and the couple have three daughters – Tara, 17 and at boarding school; Amber, 16, who is an up-and-coming dressage rider who has already represented her country, and Savanna. [3]
In December 1986, after departing from St. Barthélemy in the Caribbean with his pilot, a nanny, his pregnant wife and his four daughters, their plane went into a stall, plunged into the Caribbean and landed upside down. The pilot died, and one of de Savary's daughters had to be revived on the beach. In June 1989, de Savary underwent a life-threatening operation and lost part of his intestines. De Savary says: "At that point, my philosophy on life changed a little. When you genuinely look death in the eye twice, you know that nothing's going with you, and life is but a thread. It's a pretty tenuous thing we're hanging on to. So, what is the point of making money? I concluded it certainly isn't for accumulating it. That's the most stupid thing I ever heard of. So, there can be only one point, and that's to spend it. Now, I'm not ridiculously wasteful, but I may be slightly extravagant. As Andrew Carnegie said, to die rich is to die disgraced."[4]
