The ‘king’ of Britain’s migrant hotels is raking in £4.8million per day and may become a billionaire from the money earned through housing immigrants in the UK.
Graham King, a former caravan park and disco tycoon, was catapulted onto the Rich List this year after cashing in on accommodating and transporting arrivals due to the UK’s migrant crisis.
The 57-year-old – who has an estimated net worth of £750million – owns an Essex business which was paid £1.74billion last year and claimed this was due to the increase in refugees.
He is expected to become Britain’s first immigration industry billionaire because he has a contract with the Home Office that will last until September 2029.
Clearsprings Ready Homes, which houses migrants in hotels, unused military barracks and flats, had an income increase of £400million in just 12 months.
According to The Times, a company report shows it made a profit of £91.2million last year and paid £90million in dividends to a company controlled by King, ‘mainly to the provision of accommodation, support and transport to asylum-seekers’.
Contracts to house asylum seekers have become far more expensive due to a shortage of accommodation.
Taxpayers are paying between £127 and £148 a day to house them, which is a total of £8million per day.
But the government has said it will cut back on spending on ‘asylum hotels’ which may impact King’s business.
Some contract-holders have also been slammed for the conditions of the properties they use.
This includes Clearsprings – in 2021, two of its sites were criticised for being ‘decrepit’, ‘impoverished’ and ‘run-down’.
In 2023, 70 people, including children, slept outside in ‘protest’ after claiming they were put in small rooms without enough beds in two Clearsprings-run hotels in the capital.
At the turn of the century, King was running a caravan park in Canvey Island, Essex, with his brother.
He branched out after a disco he ran lost its licence and he suggested he could use the building – a former cinema – to house refugees instead.
Since launching his property firm in 1999, King has won a series of lucrative government contracts to provide short-term accommodation, mostly for asylum seekers.
His firm made the news when a council chose to house benefit claimants in its caravans. It was also in the firing line when inspectors found it was putting up asylum seekers in ‘decrepit’ and ‘run-down’ conditions at a former barracks in Kent and an Army camp in Pembrokeshire.
Inspectors said about a third of the residents consulted claimed to have mental health problems and inspectors found there to be ‘fundamental failures of leadership and planning’.
King’s wealth has put his son and daughter through a £44,000-a-year boarding school and funded the family’s globe-trotting holidays and Alpine ski trips.
His daughter Catalina is studying to be an artist and her creations include £10 prints bearing the slogan ‘Will trade racists for refugees’.
King was ranked as the 173rd richest person in Britain in the Sunday Times Rich List for 2024 – but vowed to climb even higher by next year.
The King family comes from Canvey Island, Essex, where Graham’s father Jack King – a shed salesman from Romford – moved his young family in the early 1960s.
Entrepreneur and football fanatic Jack bought a failing caravan holiday park from the council and turned it into a successful mobile home business, Kings Park, which he sold for £32million in 2007, the Times reported.
King followed in his father’s footsteps and spent many years working for Jack – who also owned a taxi company, a car dealership and nightclubs hosting performers including Shirley Bassey and Tommy Cooper – before launching Clearsprings.
Most of the Kings have moved away from Canvey island. King’s mother passed away in the 1970s while his father died in 2016.
MailOnline has approached Clearsprings for comment.
