Richard Desmond
Richard Clive Desmond (born 8 December 1951) is an English publisher and businessman. He is the owner of Express Newspapers and founder of Northern & Shell, which publishes various celebrity magazines, such as OK! and New!, and British national newspapers Daily Star and Daily Express. Northern & Shell also owns Portland TV which, in turn, owns the adult TV channels Television X, Red Hot TV, and others.
In 2010, Desmond was ranked the equal-57th richest man in Britain according to The Sunday Times Rich List, with a net worth of £950 million. He was once again listed on the 2011 Sunday Times Rich List, with his fortune still at £950 million. In 2014, he was ranked 78th and worth £1.2 billion. In 2015 Forbes valued his fortune at close to $1.76 billion.
Early life
Desmond was born in Hampstead, London, into a Jewish family, the youngest of three children, and grew up in Edgware, in north west London. His father was descended from Latvian Jews, and his mother was of Ukrainian-Jewish descent. His father, Cyril, was at one time managing director of cinema advertising company Pearl & Dean. An ear infection caused the sudden loss of Cyril's hearing and, according to Richard, he used to take him along, when he was no more than three years old, to act as "his ears" in business meetings, where he ostensibly acquired his "first taste of business dealings". After Cyril lost a significant amount of family money to gambling, his parents divorced and 11-year-old Desmond moved with his mother, Millie, into a flat above a garage; he has described his impoverished early adolescence as a time when he was "very fat and very lonely".
