Michael Tabor
| Michael Barry Tabor | |
|---|---|
| Born |
28 October 1941 London, United Kingdom |
| Residence | Monte Carlo, Monaco & Barbados |
| Occupation | bookmaker, businessman, race horse owner |
| Spouse(s) | Doreen |
| Children | Ashley Tabor |
Michael Barry Tabor (born 28 October 1941, in east London, United Kingdom) is a bookmaker, businessman, gambler and owner of thoroughbred racehorses.
Tabor regularly appears on the Sunday Times Rich List of the richest people in Britain. In 2012 his fortune was estimated to be £550 million; two years previously the business magazine Management Today had suggested it was $2 billion.
Michael Tabor was brought up in Forest Gate in east London, the son of a glassmaker. Tabor's grandparents were Russian-Jewish immigrants, originally called Taborosky, who had moved to London from Vilna, Russia. He was educated at East Ham Grammar School, leaving when he was 15 to get a job in the local Co-op. He was nearly a hairdresser, enrolling at the Morris School of Hairdressing in Piccadilly, but instead turned to bookmaking. Tabor's father had for a time been in partnership with a bookmaker at Romford Greyhound Stadium and Tabor himself became interested in gambling in his teens, spending Monday and Friday afternoons at Hendon's greyhound stadium in north London and regularly attending the track at White City.
Tabor worked for commission agents and credit bookmakers before setting up in business for himself in 1968. He borrowed £30,000 from a financier to buy two bankrupt betting shops from Andrew Gordon, retaining the name Arthur Prince and expanding the business until he owned a chain of 114 shops. In 1995 he sold the business to Coral for a reported £27 million. "There's an old saying I like," Tabor said, "which is that good punters make good bookmakers. I have found that to be very true."
In 1970 Tabor was banned for life from all racecourses by the Jockey Club who claimed that he had paid two jockeys, Duncan Hughes and Tom Jennings, for information. Tabor had the lifetime ban overturned three years later. In 1997 Tabor told The Observer that the ban had helped in causing him to concentrate on building the success of his business.
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