British businessman scoops up £2.5billion after promoting to BlackRock

A business mogul who once cheated death in a plane crash and his threatre-loving wife are set to join the ranks of Britain’s richest billionaires after selling their data company to BlackRock.

Mark and Lindy O’Hare have snapped up £2.55billion for handing over their 21-year-old company Preqin to the world’s biggest asset manager.

The O’Hares, who have four children and live on a Grade-II listed farmhouse on the Suffolk coast, will cling on to 80 per cent of the business, meaning they will soon scoop a phenomenal payday.

The founders will keep back a huge £2.04bn sum while the remaining £510 million will be divided between employees of the company which is based near London Victoria’s station.

It means that a lucky few of Preqin’s 500 employees, spread across the world’s largest financial hubs from New York to Hong Kong, will also become millionaires in the near future.

Once the deal is complete, Cambridge-educated Mr O’Hare, who was born in London but raised near Glasgow, and his South African-born wife, will be pushed into the top 100 richest people in Britain.

Ironically the sale will make the O’Hares richer than BlackRock founder Larry Fink, who has a net worth of £1.3bn. 

Their fortune will also place them ahead of ex-F1 supremo, Bernie Ecclestone and Hargreaves Lansdown founder Peter Hargreaves, who are both worth around £1.8bn.

Preqin which tracks the performance of private equity firms and hedge funds was created in 2003.

In the two decades it has been up and running, the UK group has attracted almost 50,000 customers, with 16 offices being created across the globe.

Mr O’Hare had remained the chief executive of the company before stepping down in 2022 while his wife worked at the firm until 2008. 

Mrs O’Hare then remained on the company board to represent the ‘family’s interests in the business’. 

Once the sale is complete, 65-year-old Mr O’Hare will join Blackrock as a vice chairman. 

The incoming exec studied mathematics and statistics at the University of Cambridge, where he represented his college rowing. 

He went on to study finance at London Business School before joining Boston Consulting Group.

Preqin’s sale is not the first time Mr O’Hare has handed over a company of his to a larger firm.

In 1993 he created a financial information provider called Citywatch, which was later sold to Reuters in 1998 for £2.5million. As with the sale of Preqin, four fifths of the sale landed in his pocket.

And in 1994, he set up a business to help fund internet start-ups called e-Acorn.com. 

There was a slight hiccup, however, between this venture and the launch of Preqin almost a decade later. In 1999, Mr O’Hare – who also is a part-time pilot – crashed his Piper Seneca seven-seat light aircraft. 

Speaking ahead of his move to BlackRock as vice chair, Mr O’Hare said yesterday: ‘BlackRock is known for excellence in both investment management and financial technology, and together we can accelerate our efforts to deliver better private markets data and analytics to all of our clients at scale.

‘I look forward to joining BlackRock and continuing to play a role in the continued growth and success of Preqin and our customers.’

Mrs O’Hare, also 65, meanwhile studied English at the University of Natal and later at Goldsmith College where she studied Contemporary Art. 

The mother-of-four, who also holds an Irish passport, went on to become an interior designer.

While the O’Hares are about to be flung further onto the global financial stage, the couple will no doubt try and keep time for their hobbies.

In 2017 moved into the Stone House Farm – a Grade-II listed farmhouse near Southwold on the Suffolk Coast.

Just before the pandemic they started to build an open-air threatre in a clearing in the woods which had been created by a Second World War bomb. 

When lockdown eventually ended, the 350-seat venue called Thorington Theatre was up and running, with the first audience being welcomed in June 2021.

The theatre, which is open from June to August, cost between £60,000 – £70,000 to set up, Mrs O’Hare previously said.  

It was initially created to be a space for local drama groups and amateur actors but as with the couple’s other entrepreneurial ideas it quickly became a success. 

‘Profit was not the driving force – as long as it’s not a drain on the farm, we’re happy,’ Mrs O’Hare told the BBC in 2022. ‘The previous owner had also had the idea – when you saw the crater it was obvious it was an amphitheatre.’

One day the new billionaires hope to host the Royal Shakespeare Company for a production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream. A local children’s company had performed the play earlier on which was a big hit. 

But the Ed Sheeran fan added: ‘One day, Ed Sheeran will come. He lives at Framlingham, so he’s only down the road. That’s the dream.’

‘I thought I was a farmer, then, at the age of 60, I’m suddenly running a theatre,’ Mrs O’Hare told Country Life magazine last year.

‘It sounded barking mad, but after walking past for a couple of months, I said to my husband, ‘Why don’t we do it?’ He’s the one who said, ‘Yes, we’ll do it with our own timber.’

Perhaps with their new found billionaire-fortune even more money will be invested into the threatre in the woods.