Peter de Savary
Peter John de Savary (born 11 July 1944) is an English entrepreneur and a former Chairman of Millwall F.C. In 1997, The Independent gave his fortune as £24 million and 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 thousand places in subsequent editions.
De Savary is the son of a French-born Essex farmer, and was educated in England at the private Charterhouse School from which he was expelled at the age of 16. He then moved to Canada where his divorced mother and stepfather lived and did gardening, baby-sitting and children's private tuition. At the age of 18, with his wife Marcia and daughter, he moved back to the UK to work for his father. During a visit to Canada in 1969 he took over a small import-export agency, Afrex, that did business in Africa. On a subsequent flight to Nigeria he met the brother of the President of Nigeria with whom he went into business supplying wheat, flour, steel, cement and other goods to Nigeria and other African countries making him a millionaire by the age of 30.
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 refuelling business.
His first venture into 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.
However, in the early 1990s economic downturn his empire collapsed – he sold both Land's End and John o' Groats in 1991 for an undisclosed sum to the businessman Graham Ferguson Lacey and his holding company Placeton went bankrupt in 1994 with debts of £200 million by one source and £715 million by another.
His business activities since 2000 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 though 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. This was sold in 2003 to Ellis Short. Through his wife Lana's company, Havana West, 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. Again with Lana's Havana West company he founded the Abaco Club at Winding Bay in Abaco, Bahamas, building a spectacular golf course on the beautiful Winding Bay beach and bluff.
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