A computer engineer who developed the gambling software for a phenomenally successful online casino and poker company has hit the jackpot after being named as one of Britain's richest Asians.
Indian-born Anurag Dikshit (pictured), co-founder of PartyGaming, rocketed to number three in the annual list of the country's wealthiest Asians, with an estimated fortune of £1.7 billion.
The 34-year-old's success comes less than a decade after he created the software, which allowed thousands of gamblers to bet online at the same time, 24 hours a day.
He is one of four new entries in the top ten of the Sunrise Radio Asian Rich List 300, which will be officially revealed at a press conference in London today.
Also on the list in ninth position is Lord Paul of Marylebone, one time Chancellor of Wolverhampton University, whose Caparo Group is now estimated to be worth £465m.
The company, started from a small factory in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, in 1968 now has a turnover of more than £600m a year and employs 4,200 people worldwide.
1 Lakshmi Mittal LNM Group £14.8bn 2 GP & SP Hinduja Sangam Group £3.6bn 3 Anurag Dikshit PartyGaming £1.7bn 4 Anil Aggarwal Vedanta Resources £1.68bn 5 The Jatania Brothers Lornamead £850m 6 Naresh Goyal & Family Jet Airways £780m 7 Vikrant Bhargava PartyGaming £592m 8 Felix Grovit Chequepoint £465m 8 Lord Paul & Family The Caparo Group £465 10 Gulu Lalvani Binatone £450m |
Dikshit's meteoric rise is typical of many of the Asian entrepreneurs on the list, who emigrated abroad at a young age and exploited their business acumen in the West.
Dikshit, pronounced Dixit, graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi in 1994, and worked for a software developer in the USA the following year.
His life changed when he met entrepreneur Ruth Parasol, who had made a small fortune in online pornography, but by 1998 was looking at moving into the "next big thing" - online gambling.
Dikshit, who was just 25, was asked to create the programmes for casino games such as roulette.
Parasol considered Dikshit's skills so crucial to the future success of the business, that she allocated him 32 per cent of the shares in the company.
They launched Party Poker in August 2001, and cashed in on the booming interest in online gaming in America and Europe.
The PartyGaming websites, which make £500 a minute, proved so successful that it had to update its technology to allow 70,000 gamblers to play online at the same time.
The company floated on the stock exchange last year, turning Dikshit into a billionaire overnight.
His friend Vikrant Bhargava, who he recruited from the IIT to head the company's Caribbean operations, also appears in the rich list at number seven, with an estimated fortune of £600m.
The pair are both based in Gibraltar, which is included in the list for the first time as a British dependency.
The combined wealth of the 300 Asian multimillionaires has risen from £24.9bn in 2005, to a staggering total of £35.5bn - an increase of 42.6 per cent.
The London-based steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal has easily held on to his place at the top of the rich list, with a fortune of £14.8bn - making him the third wealthiest person in the world.
Brothers Srichand and Gopichand Hinduja have also maintained their runner's-up position, with a joint wealth of £3.6bn from their global finance, telecommunications, film and oil businesses.
Just three per cent of people on the Asian Rich List inherited their wealth, compared to a third of entrants on the The Sunday Times Rich List.
But only 22 women are among the top 300 Asian entrepreneurs, including Meena Pathak, of the Pathak spices empire.
The list was compiled by Dr Philip Beresford, author of the Sunday Times Rich List.
Lakshmi Mittal Mittal grew up in the steel industry but it was not until he took over his father Mohan's firm Ispat Steel that business really began to take off. With the Indian government heavily restricting domestic steel production, Mr Mittal opened a state-of-the-art mill in Indonesia in 1976 . His search for non-scrap iron to feed the thriving plant took him to Trinidad and Tobago, where he in 1989 he took on Iscott, a government-founded steel firm which was losing more than $100,000 a day. Within a year, after airfreighting in cutting-edge technology, Iscott was making a profit. And the stage was set for a decade of international expansion which saw Mr Mittal's LNM, through various Ispat-named subsidiaries, buy plants in Mexico, Canada, Germany, Ireland and Kazakhstan. Connections with London were established in 1995 when the firm's headquarters were transferred from Indonesia to a city Mr Mittal still rates as the world's financial centre. Mr Mittal has been caught up in sleaze allegations after Tony Blair wrote a letter supporting Mr Mittal's business dealings after he had previously donated £125,000 to the Labour Party. The Hinduja Brothers The Hinduja brothers have amassed billions of pounds through their business interests but not without ruffling a few feathers along the way. There are four Hinduja brothers - Srichand and Gopichand, who are based in London and are now UK citizens, Prakash in Geneva, who is now a Swiss national, and Ashok in Bombay, who is still an Indian citizen. They have been involved in several scandals, notably accusations of irregularities about citizenship applications involving Peter Mandelson and MP for Labour East Keith Vaz and have recently been cleared of allegations of corruption. The brothers provided money for Faith Zone at the Millennium Dome and it is alleged that this was in exchange for the Government granting them British citizenship. The brothers' fortunes are not held individually, but as the communal property of the House of Hinduja. The Jatania Brothers The Jatania brothers, who own consumer brands that range from Harmony hairspray to Lipsyl lip balm, are preparing to float a venture on the London Stock Exchange for the first time. Lornamead Group, the personal hygiene and homecare brands company owned by Uganda-born Indians Mike, George, Vin and Danny Jatania, has been trading since 1978, building up a private business now worth hundreds of millions of pounds. Over the past four years, it has followed a strategy of snapping up unwanted consumer brands from multinationals such as Unilever, Bristol Myers-Squibb and Sara Lee. Now, it is linking up with the London-quoted Equity Partnership Investment Company (Epic) to launch a specialist investment fund that aims to buy more brands and invest in some of Lornamead's existing products. It marks the first stock market involvement by the Jatania brothers, who live with their families in London apartments. Their main asset is Lornamead, headquartered in Dubai with offices in London, Toronto, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Lagos and Dublin, but the brothers have a tongue-in-cheek motto - Let dynasty not become Dallas - to warn them against getting into family feuds. |
