Gerald Ronson

Ronson was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2012 New Year Honours for charitable services, notwithstanding his criminal past, convictions, fines and imprisonment.

Ronson has won City AM's Personality of the Year Award in September 2011 and other awards. In 2009, Juan Carlos I of Spain bestowed Gerald Ronson with the Encomienda de Numero of the Spanish Order of Civil Merit Decoration. In the same year, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Civil Law from Northumbria University.

The Ronson family suffered from the 1990s commercial property crash: "The Ronson family lost $1 billion of its own money in the property crash of the early 1990s," Gerald Ronson says. "The important thing was to rebuild."

By 1989, he was listed by The Times as having a net worth of £500 million.

By the early 1980s Heron was one of the largest private companies in the United Kingdom, with assets of over £1.5 billion. By the 1990s, it almost collapsed with debts of over £1 billion owed to 11,000 bondholders. The company survived with loans from Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Craig McCaw, Oracle Corporation's founder, Larry Ellison, and others, and went on to develop projects including Heron Tower and The Heron in the City of London and The Peak in London's Victoria.

Ronson became notorious in the UK as one of the Guinness Four for his involvement in the Guinness share-trading fraud of the 1980s. He was convicted in August 1990 of one charge of conspiracy, two of false accounting, and one of theft. He was fined £5 million and given a one-year jail sentence, of which he served six months. In 2000 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that use of statements made to inspectors in the 1990 trial had been unfair, but rejected five other complaints and denied a costs application. An appeal to the Court of Appeal Criminal Division, seeking to have the Human Rights Act 1998 applied retrospectively, failed in 2001. A final appeal to the House of Lords failed in 2002. No further appeal was possible and the convictions were upheld.

Ronson was born into a middle-class Jewish family. He left school aged 15 to join his father in the family furniture business, named Heron after his father Henry. The company expanded into property development, at first with small residential projects, later with commercial and office properties too. By 1967 the company was active in seven European countries and fifty-two British municipalities. In the mid-1960s Ronson brought the first self-service petrol retail outlets to the United Kingdom.

Gerald Maurice Ronson, CBE (born 27 May 1939) is a British business tycoon and philanthropist. He became known in the UK as one of the 'Guinness Four' for his part in the Guinness share-trading fraud of the 1980s as a result of which he was convicted and imprisoned.