An island-based billionaire has seen his family’s wealth increase by £225m over the last 12 months.

Property tycoon John Whittaker, who lives in the south of the island, is the Isle of Man wealthiest resident as revealed in the 2025 Sunday Times Rich List.

His fortune has risen to £2bn, up £225m in the last 12 months, placing him in 81st equal place in the Rich List, up from 96 last year.

Mr Whittaker’s Peel Group, founded more than 50 years ago, invests in property and infrastructure projects, its Peel Ports subsidiary is the owner of the ports of Heysham and Liverpool, and Liverpool John Lennon Airport.

He got involved in the family business in the 1960s and began buying up land around Manchester Ship Canal before building the Trafford Centre near Manchester.

PokerStars founder Mark Scheinberg once topped the list as the island’s wealthiest man but no longer lives here - although he currently still owns a home in Douglas.

He comes in at number 38 on the Rich List, up from 41 last year, with a fortune of £5.081bn, up £406m from 2024.

The Israeli Canadian businessman co-founded PokerStars with his father Isai and built it up into the world’s biggest online poker company, before selling it in 2014 for £3.3bn.

In 2017, he founded global investment firm Mohari Hospitality which has a focus on luxury hospitality.

With his family he set up the Scheinberg Relief Fund in 2020 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Funding from his family foundation previously helped save the Family Library from closure. The library is once again under threat.

Chemicals magnate Sir Jim Ratcliffe tops the North West list with a net worth of 17.046bn.

He was once Britain’s second richest man but successive drops in his fortune, including a massive £6.4bn decrease in the last 12 months alone, have seen his UK ranking fall to seventh this year.

The 72-year-old became part-owner of Manchester United at the end of 2023 and his deal to buy 25% of the club was completed using an Isle of Man-registered company Trawlers Limited.

The company takes its name from Eric Cantona’s famous quote: ‘When seagulls follow the trawler it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea’.

The Sunday Times Rich List, which went line online on Friday and will appear in the as a 76-page special edition of The Sunday Times Magazine this weekend, highlights the wealth of the 350 richest people in the British Isles.

But this year’s list reveals the largest fall in the billionaire count in the guide’s 37-year history, from a peak of 177 in 2022 to 156 this year. The number of billionaires has dropped for three successive years – this year's decline is the sharpest yet.

Robert Watts, compiler of the Sunday Times Rich List, said: ‘The Sunday Times Rich List is changing. Our billionaire count is down and the combined wealth of those who feature in our research is falling. We are also finding fewer of the world’s super rich are coming to live in the UK.

‘This year we were also struck by the strength of criticism for Rachel Reeves’s Treasury. We expected the abolition of non-dom status would anger affluent people from overseas. But homegrown young tech entrepreneurs and those running centuries-old family firms are also warning of serious consequences to a range of tax changes unveiled in last October’s budget.

‘Our research continues to find a wide variety of self-made entrepreneurs building fortunes not just from artificial intelligence, video games and new technologies but also mundane, everyday items such as makeup, radiators and jogging bottoms. We know many of our readers find these people and their stories inspiring — especially the many who had tough starts or setbacks to their lives and careers.’

You can read the full Rich List here: https://www.thetimes.com/sunday-times-rich-list