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
I'm very cheerful about coming back to the U.K. We increasingly found ourselves gravitating towards London. There was so much going on for our business, and we had grown substantially here.
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.
While unions did not play a part in my family life when I was being brought up, my early years were most certainly spent in a working-class community.
Towards the end of 2005, Ineos acquired Innovene, the petrochemicals arm of BP, for $9 billion. It quadrupled the size of Ineos overnight and brought with it some of the world's largest industrial sites.
There's no substitute for seeing firsthand a well being drilled.
It would be nice if areas could be revitalised - like places in the U.S. such as Pittsburgh, for example, which have been transformed through shale. There you have shiny cars in a shiny city because of the development of shale in an old industrial heartland.
The Brits are perfectly capable of managing the Brits and don't need Brussels telling them how to manage things.
Do your analysis of energy costs. Either it comes from windmills and solar or things like nuclear and shale gas. You have to think about how you provide competitive energy for U.K. Ltd.
Brussels has become inefficient and very bureaucratic, which makes it slow to do things. The concept of the United States of Europe will never work.
Shale is one answer to the U.K.'s energy problem, and it has obviously worked extraordinarily well in America.
It's always been hard work for us to manufacture in the U.K. It's not a particularly profitable place for us.
Unions do have a proper role in negotiating for employees and advising employees, but they have to engage with the employer.