For the fourth year in a row, Gopichand Hinduja has remained the richest person in Britain.
According to today’s Sunday Times Rich List 2025, the 85-year-old businessman and his family, who own the Indian giant Hinduja Group, are worth £35 billion.
But who are the Hinduja family? Here’s everything we know.
Born on January 29, 1940, the richest man in Britain started his career in India, working for his father’s textile company with his late brother Srichand, who died in 2023.
In 2000, the family—and Srichand specifically—were enmeshed in scandal after it was revealed that Labour minister Peter Mandleson had called Home Office minister Mike O’Brien on the Srichand’s behalf while he sought British citizenship.
This led to Mr Mandleson’s resignation from Government, but that same month it was made public that Foreign Office minister Keith Vaz also contacted the Home Office on behalf of the brothers.
In June of that year, Mr Vaz was fired from his position as Europe Minister after acknowledging that he had made false statements when the brothers applied for passports while he was a backbencher.
In a separate investigation into his financial dealings at the end of 2001, the Hindujas cleared Mr Vaz of failing to register payments to his wife’s legal firm, but they did discover that he had conspired with his wife to hide the payments.
It stated that although Mr Vaz had not personally benefited from the payments made to his wife for legal advice on immigration matters, he was exempt from disclosing this information in the House of Commons.
In 2024, Gopi’s brother Prakash as well as his wife, son Ajay and his wife Namrata, were found guilty of exploitation and illegal employment by a Swiss court and handed sentences ranging from four to four-and-a-half years.
How did he make his fortune?
Beginning in the trading and textile division of his father’s company, Gopi and his brothers expanded the family business into one of the most valuable in the world in the 1980s and 1990s.
In the 1980s, the siblings broadened their business interests by purchasing Gulf Oil and Ashok Leyland from British Leyland, and in the 1990s, they opened banks in India and Switzerland.
The largest metal fluids manufacturer in the world, Houghton International, was purchased by their Hinduja Group in 2012 for about $1 billion.
The Hinduja Group operates in a variety of industries, such as energy, media and entertainment, and banking and finance. Approximately 200,000 people are employed by the conglomerate worldwide.
Hinduja is married to Sunita Hinduja and the pair have three children – Sanjay, Dheeraj and Rita.
Sunita keeps her life private and not much is known about the billionaire’s wife.
Gopi’s oldest son Sanjay followed in his father’s lead and is the chairman of Gulf Oil International Limited.
He is also an assistant clinical professor of medicine at UC San Francisco and is a member of multiple medical societies including: American Society of Hematology, American Society of Clinical Oncology, Canadian Association of Medical Oncologists, as well as Fresno Madera Medical Society.
In 2015, he married designer Anu Mahtani in a lavish £15 million wedding in Udaipur, India, complete with performances by Jennifer Lopez and Nicole Scherzinger.
Born in Tehran, Iran, Dheeraj also followed in his father’s footsteps and has been the chairman of Ashok Leyland since October 2010.
He received a bachelor’s degree from University College London in 1993, and an MBA from Imperial College London in 1994.
While at Imperial he met Shalini Chandiramani, the daughter of a Morroco-based film distributor, the pair married some time before 1996 and have two children Vedika and Vedant.
The family’s only daughter Rita was born in Tehran, Iran and moved to London at the age of eight with her family at the time of the Revolution. However, she returned to her roots in Pune, India, where in 1999, she set up the Mukul Madhav Foundation (MMF).
Rita is also part of the family business as the co-chairman of the Hinduja Group. She is married to Finolex chairman Prakash P Chhabria.
