Gerald Ronson - Biography

Gerald Maurice Ronson is a British business tycoon and philanthropist.

Career

Aged 15, Ronson left school and joined his father in the family furniture business, named Heron after his father Henry. The company expanded into other activities; in the mid-1960s Ronson brought the first self-service petrol retail outlets to the United Kingdom. Heron once controlled almost a thousand of them. Heron was also involved in property (American usage real estate) 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.

By the early 1980s Heron was one of the largest private companies in the United Kingdom, with assets of over £1.5 billion, but the company was over-extended and by the 1990s had almost collapsed with debts of £2.4 billion owed to 89 banks and 15,000 bondholders. The company survived with help from Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Craig McCaw, Oracle Corporation’s founder, Larry Ellison, and others who gave loans to Heron.

Ronson became known in the UK as one of the "Guinness Four" for his involvement in the Guinness share-trading fraud of the 1980s, along with Ernest Saunders and occasional business associates Jack Lyons and Anthony Parnes. 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 because there had been an improper collusion between the DTI inspectors and the prosecuting authorities. A further appeal to the Court of Appeal Criminal Division, that sought to have the Human Rights Act 1998 applied retrospectively, and claimed that the trial jury had been "nobbled", failed in 2001. A final appeal to the House of Lords (now the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom) failed in 2002.

Personal life

Ronson is married to philanthropist and socialite Dame Gail Ronson. They have four daughters: Lisa, Amanda, Nicole and Hayley.

Autobiography

• Leading From The Front: My Story by Gerald Ronson with Jeffrey Robinson.

External links

• "Guinness Four fail in fight for acquittal", BBC News, 21 December 2001.
• "Life and high-flying times of four partners in crime", The Scotsman, 22 December 2001.
• Gerald Ronson profile in the UK business magazine Leisure Management
• "A Guy Named Gerald," interview with Gerald Ronson, Building.co.uk, 2007.