Glasgow home to largest proportion of Scotland’s richest

There are 16 Rich List millionaires from or based in Glasgow with combined wealth of just under £4.5bn, which accounts for 13.7 per cent of the overall total of £32.7bn shared by the 100 richest Scots.

The Glasgow Rich List is headed by John Shaw, who left the city to build a £1.15bn pharmaceuticals fortune in Bangalore with his Indian wife Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw.

However, Moray, the home of Grant’s whisky and Baxter’s soup, has produced seven fortunes worth almost £5.4bn - representing 16.5 per cent of the wealth of the top 100. Much of this is centred around Speyside where the Grant Gordon family, who head the whole Scottish Rich List worth £2.37bn, have two of their whisky distilleries.

Buckie-born Norwegian industrialist Trond Mohn shares a £1.62bn fortune with his London-based sister Marit Mohn Westlake. A relative pauper by comparison in Speyside is Fochabers-based Audrey Baxter, who has seen her family food fortune drop by £9m this year to £86m.

Perthshire and Tayside, with combined fortunes worth £4.7bn, account for 14.4 per cent of the Rich List wealth. Madhi al-Tajir, worth £1.67m, has a 24-000 acre Perthshire estate and is owner of the Highland Spring bottled water operation. The Dundee-based Thomson publishing family is worth £1.285bn.

In contrast, Edinburgh has no billionaires but has 17 millionaires - more than any other city in Scotland with combined wealth of £3.9bn. Isle of Man-based property investor Jim Mellon, worth £920m, who was born in the capital, tops the Edinburgh list ahead of author Joanne Rowling, worth £650m.

Billionaire Sir Ian Wood, worth £1.6bn, heads the 14 Aberdeen millionaires who share more £3.6bn, which is just over 11% of the 2017 Rich List wealth.

There are 16 Scottish millionaires who this year feature among the top 200 Rich List charitable donors in the UK. Between them, these 16 Scots have made charitable donations totalling £116.5m.

The Sunday Times Giving List ranks UK philanthropists on the proportion of their fortunes they have donated to charitable causes.

Sir Tom Hunter, who ranks sixth on this year’s Scotland Giving List with a £7.2m charitable spend, is hosting a fundraising dinner in Edinburgh on Friday where former US president Barack Obama will address Scottish business and philanthropy leaders.

Sir Brian Souter, ranked fifth in the Scotland Giving List alongside his sister Ann Gloag, spent £8.2m charitably in the past year. While Aberdeen-based billionaire Sir Ian Wood’s foundation has donated more than £30m to help the poor in Scotland and sub-Saharan Africa in the past year, which places him fourth on the list.

J K Rowling, ranked third, continues to pour money into her Scotland-based Volant Trust and her London-based charity Lumus while Sir Andy Murray, worth £77m, sits in ninth place and at the top is the Marquess of Bute.