# 251 Anthony Bamford & family $9.57B

The majority of Bamford's fortune is derived from JCB, a Rocester, England-based construction equipment manufacturer. JCB has sales in 150 countries and revenue of 5.7 billion pounds ($7 billion) in 2022, according to the company's annual results.

A Bermuda-based holding company, AB Bermuda Trust One, controls his stake in JCB, according to court documents filed in the UK crown dependency of Jersey in 2003. JCB's ultimate parent is Switzerland-based JCB Group Holdings Sarl, according to company filings. It's valued using 2022 financials and the average enterprise value-to-revenue and price-to-earnings multiples of Caterpillar and Komatsu. It was updated on Oct. 10. 2023, to reflect the 2022 results and this led to an increase in the valuation of about $1.4 billion.

The Jersey court documents detailed that the will of Bamford's father split 50% of JCB equally between Bamford and his brother, Mark. Before his death, their father had already placed the other half of JCB into trusts for the benefit of his sons. The exact split has never been disclosed. Anthony Bamford has been the company's chairman since 1975, and is credited with a 75% stake to reflect his operational control of the company. His brother is credited with the remainder.

Cash investments are valued based on an analysis of dividends, market performance, insider transactions, taxes and charitable contributions.

Nigel Chell, a JCB spokesman, said Bamford declined to comment on his net worth.

Anthony Bamford was born on Oct. 23, 1945, the same day his father, Joseph Cyril Bamford, founded the construction-equipment company that bears his initials. After spending three years working as an engineering apprentice at Massey Ferguson, a French farm equipment maker, Anthony returned to England and took a job at JCB's Rocester, England factory, in 1964.

He took over as chairman of the company 11 years later, when his father stepped down and moved to Switzerland with his mistress, Jayne Ellis, who at the time worked in the typing pool at JCB headquarters. Bamford's mother, a devout Roman Catholic, refused to divorce him. That same year, Anthony married his current wife, Carole Whitt.

Under Bamford's direction, JCB Service integrated the production of its machines and, in 1979, set up its first overseas operation in India. The country now represents JCB's largest single market, helping to make it the world's third-largest construction-equipment manufacturer by volume, an achievement that saw Bamford knighted by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace in 1990.

The family holdings became the subject of a legal battle after Joseph Bamford died in 2001. While alive, he gave half the company to his two sons and, in his will, left the other half to them, pledging the income from it to Ellis. Bamford, his younger brother Mark, and their mother initiated a legal battle to annul the will and later reached an out-of-court settlement with Ellis. Bamford was quoted in the Birmingham Post newspaper, in 2005, saying that "the company continues in the exclusive ownership of the Bamford family."

Bamford came under scrutiny five years later, when Prime Minister David Cameron recommended him for a peerage, a British honor. He withdrew from consideration amid questions about his tax status, which he later proved unfounded by funding a Pricewaterhousecoopers investigation into his taxes going back 15 years. The same year, a dispute with his brother Mark over the ownership of JCB Research, a subsidiary of JCB, came within days of reaching the High Court before being settled out-of-court.

Bamford has three children with his wife, Carole, who runs a chain of organic shops that sells produce from Daylesford, the couple's 1,700-acre rural estate in Gloucestershire, England. He is a donor to Britain's Conservative Party.