Gerald Maurice Ronson, CBE is a British business tycoon and philanthropist.
Early life and career
Ronson was born into a middle-class Jewish family. He left school aged 15 to join his father in the family furniture business, named Heron after his father Henry. The company expanded into property development, at first with small residential projects, later with commercial and office properties too. By 1967 the company was active in seven European countries and fifty-two British municipalities. In the mid-1960s Ronson brought the first self-service petrol retail outlets to the United Kingdom.
Heron International
By the early 1980s Heron was one of the largest private companies in the United Kingdom, with assets of over £1.5 billion. By the 1990s, it almost collapsed with debts of over £1 billion owed to 11,000 bondholders. The company survived with loans from Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Craig McCaw, Oracle Corporation's founder, Larry Ellison, and others, and went on to develop projects including Heron Tower and The Heron in the City of London and The Peak in London's Victoria. Ronson's more recent additional business ventures include Ronson Capital Partners, an investment firm he established to invest opportunistically in real estate assets in the UK; and Rontec Investments, a consortium comprising Snax 24, Investec and Grovepoint Capital, created to acquire the assets of Total Oil UK. By 1989, he was listed by The Times as having a net worth of UK£500 million. The Ronson family suffered from the 1990s commercial property crash: "The Ronson family lost $1 billion of its own money in the property crash of the early 1990s," Gerald Ronson says. "The important thing was to rebuild."
Criminal conviction and the "Guinness Four"
Ronson became notorious in the UK as one of the Guinness Four for his involvement in the Guinness share-trading fraud of the 1980s. He was convicted in August 1990 of one charge of conspiracy, two of false accounting, and one of theft, and was fined £5 million and given a one-year jail sentence, of which he served six months. In 2000 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the 1990 trial had been unfair. An appeal to the Court of Appeal Criminal Division, seeking to have the Human Rights Act 1998 applied retrospectively, failed in 2001. A final appeal to the House of Lords failed in 2002 and therefore no further appeal was possible and the convictions remained upheld.
Ronson is married to philanthropist and socialite Dame Gail Ronson. They have four daughters: Lisa, Amanda, Nicole and Hayley. He is the uncle of record producer Mark Ronson. When asked about his family and Jewish heritage in an interview with the Jewish Telegraph, Ronson responded: "I am a proud Jew when I go back to when I was a young boy, nothing has changed and that's how I look at the Ronson family, involved in school building, whether it be Israel, the Jewish Leadership Council, Jewish Care or most of the major organisations I've been involved in". He wants his four daughters, nine grandchildren and eventual great-grandchildren to "understand who they are, what they are, what their background is and what their responsibility is. I've given them the tools to be able to continue doing those things in their life which I believe will make them good people".
