Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, the sixth Duke of Westminster, died suddenly in early August at age 64, leaving a family enterprise worth £9 billion,
a
Financial Times
report said.
His 25-year-old son, Hugh, inherits his title and estate.
The family's holdings include “some of London's most exclusive addresses, such as Eaton Square (where Lady Thatcher lived), Grosvenor Square, site of the U.S. embassy, the freehold of which family trustees refused to sell to the U.S., and such well-known London locations as the Beaumont Hotel and the Gagosian Gallery,” the
FT
article said.
Gerald inherited his title when his father died in 1979, a time when the country faced 26% inflation, a miners' strike and a fuel crisis. The family was also still paying off taxes owed after the 1953 death of the second duke, the article said.
The
FT
report credited Gerald's work to build on an established trustee structure by delegating operating responsibility to non-family executives. After he suffered a breakdown in 1999, he left strategic planning to the CEO, the
FT
report said. However, Gerald played a role in Grosvenor Group's ill-fated investment in the Liverpool One shopping center, which opened in 2008, the article said.
The family enterprise consists of Grovesnor Group, which manages £13.1 billion of mostly urban real estate, including assets run for third parties; Wheatsheaf, which invests in agricultural and renewable energy companies; and the family office, which manages rural estates in the U.K. and Spain plus interests such as fine art. The property division owns 1,550 properties, including shopping centers in Vancouver, Stockholm and Shanghai and luxury developments in Hong Kong and Tokyo, the article said.
The family's wealth grew from £6.5 billion in 2009 to £9.4 billion this year, the report said.
Grosvenor Group's research director said in the company's 2015 annual report that the company is entering “a key period of large-scale change across a range of fronts” and that global real estate returns are “past their peak for the current cycle” and “increasingly susceptible to even small shifts in sentiment,” the
FT
reported.
“Careful tax planning is likely to protect Hugh Grosvenor from the inheritance tax burdens his predecessors struggled with, and his father's work in professionalising the business will relieve him of any need to micromanage Grosvenor Group. But the seventh Duke of Westminster still has the task of leading the estate — and the family — into deeply uncertain times,” the
FT
article said. (Source:
Financial Times
, Aug. 13-4, 2016.)
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