Founder and head of top international hedge fund, The Children’s Investment Fund (TCI), Christopher Hohn, has paid himself a dividend of £575 million after his company recorded fantastic profits this year.

Hohn , whose father is Jamaican, has one of the best performing funds in the United Kingdom (UK) and saw his profits increase from £285 million last year to end this fiscal year at £732 million, a jump of 50 per cent in pre-tax profits. 

In simpler terms, he has decided to pay himself £1.6 million a day. That’s a lot of cream for a fat cat!

Last year, during the height of the pandemic, he paid himself a relatively modest sum, just £115 million in dividends. However, the year before that, he paid himself £343 million, a million pounds a day.

LIFE BUILT AROUND HELPING OTHERS

TCI holds £30 billion in investments. It holds stakes in Visa, Microsoft and Alphabet.

A lot has been made of Hohn pocketing this large sum in dividends, but he holds 100 per cent of a company he built and he has done well by doing good (improving the lives of children living in poverty in developing countries).

If one does well by honest endeavours, why not reward yourself?

Hohn may very well be using those dividends to help others. He has built his life around that approach to how he conducts his business affairs.

Hohn’s story is remarkable and it is often said that he could help Jamaica by utilising his skills to help the country navigate its way out of low growth and a high-debt-ridden economy.

His father, a Jamaican mechanic, came to England in 1960 and Hohn was born in 1966. He graduated from Southampton University in 1988 with a degree in accounting and business economics before going to Harvard.

He began his business career at private equity company, Apax Partners.

He set up his own company in 2003 and built a reputation as one of the best fund managers in the UK.

With an office in Mayfair, London, and his parent company headquartered in The Cayman Islands, he built TCI into one of the world’s best funds with an emphasis on philanthropy.

In 2006, the now British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak went to work at Hohn’s TCI and became a millionaire when he left the firm in 2009.

Hohn is the 67th richest person in Britain with a £3-billion fortune. He is the richest person in the world with Jamaican ancestry.

But, it is not all about money and building personal wealth for Hohn – he is not an avaricious, one-dimensional corporate shark.

ACTIVIST INVESTOR

He has been described as an activist investor, a great believer in climate change, an advocate for measures to be put in place to reduce pollution and carbon emissions.

“Humanity is aggressively destroying the world with climate change and there is an urgent need for us all to wake up to the fact,“ Hohn once said.

In 2019, Forbes put Hohn on the list of the world’s most generous philanthropists outside the United States.

He is not a man who puts himself in the spotlight. He lives modestly and avoids attention. In 2014, he faced the glare of publicity when he divorced his wife, Jamie Cooper-Hohn, and  agreed to pay her £445 million.

During  divorce court proceedings, Hohn said: “My life is actively about charity. I learned very early on [that] you cannot take money with you.”