Jim Ratcliffe
Jim Ratcliffe
James Arthur "Jim" Ratcliffeis a British chemical engineer turned financier and industrialist. Ratcliffe is the chairman and chief executive officer of the Ineos chemicals group, which he founded in 1998 and still owns two-thirds of, and which has been estimated to have a turnover of $44bn. He does not have a high public profile, and has been described by the Sunday Times as "publicity shy". According to the 2010 Sunday Times Rich List, he is one of the richest people...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth18 October 1952
It is not necessary, nor appropriate, to sow dissent and misrepresent employees or constantly to threaten industrial action.
I think the U.K. would be perfectly successful as a standalone country, part of the European marketplace like Norway and Switzerland but without the expensive E.U. bureaucracy.
If it's hemorrhaging cash, you've got to do something about it. You can't live with your head in the sand.
Ineos is a friendly organisation. Very few people leave. It's collegiate. There's not much politics, and we like decent people. We don't like arrogance or bullies.
In America, if you are a landowner, you own the minerals vertically underneath your plot. So if there is shale, you get a share.
I'm not sure we could spell 'shale' in 2008.
If you have spent your life building Ineos, and you find yourself in a crisis, you are going to do anything you can to save what you have been building.
If you go to the U.S., you've got a huge market, cheap energy, good skills, and pensions are a sensible cost.
Gas is by far and away the most important element of our energy policy.
Germany has great skill levels, great infrastructure, high-quality plant. If you go to the U.K., we're very creative, and we've got the language, but energy costs are pretty much the most expensive in the Western world; pensions are pretty expensive, and the skills are significantly below those in Germany and the U.S.
The U.K. is one of the few places in the world that has final salary pensions.
The U.K. is already disadvantaged on the wholesale cost of energy, and then it puts taxes on it. Anybody who's an energy user is just going to disappear.
America's got quite reasonable tax rates from an employee point of view.
You can't have an energy policy that means you can only have a bath when the wind blows.