Gerald Ronson
Gerald Maurice Ronson, CBE (born 27 April 1939) is a 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 property 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. In the mid-1960s Ronson brought the first self-service petrol retail outlets to the United Kingdom.
Heron International
By the early 1980s Heron was one of the largest private companies in the United Kingdom, with assets of over £1.5 billion. By the 1990s, it almost collapsed with debts of over £1 billion owed to 11,000 bondholders. The company survived with loans from Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Craig McCaw, Oracle Corporation's founder, Larry Ellison, and others.
Ronson's more recent additional business ventures include Ronson Capital Partners, an investment firm he established to invest opportunistically in real estate assets in the UK; and Rontec Investments, a consortium comprising Snax 24, Investec and Grovepoint Capital, created to acquire the assets of Total Oil UK.