'Don't call me the British Warren Buffett': He's worth £850m and believes his friend Farage is right on quitting the EU ... Jim Mellon gives a candid insight into his world

A child born today could expect to live to 120 years of age; in 15 years’ time perfectly safe driverless cars will be common; and Nigel Farage is absolutely right that Britain should quit the EU. Welcome to the world of Jim Mellon.

As one of Britain’s richest people – his wealth is estimated at £850million – Mellon has been described as our very own Warren Buffett. His wealth was made in investment in emerging markets, notably Russia.

But he also made headlines recently when it emerged he had introduced Farage to a millionaire leading donor and had invited the Ukip chief to his birthday lunch at a top eaterie in, of all places, Brussels. He describes Farage as a ‘friend’ rather than pinning his political colours to the Ukip mast.

Casual: Jim Mellon in the City this week

But despite the penchant for Belgium’s restaurants, Mellon is at one with Farage in his dislike of their bureaucrats.

‘I have a house in Brussels and I can see the Brussels bureaucracy up close and on exit from the European Union, I am totally with him. I don’t believe it would be a disaster if we left the EU, because they sell a lot more to us than we sell to them. There are ways of accommodation with the EU, demonstrated by Switzerland which the British could model themselves on.

 

‘There’s an intractable problem of imposing a one-size-fits-all system on disparate nations. The idealistic appeal of political union in Europe just doesn’t work.’ And he saves his worst criticism for France. ‘France is run by a committee of lemmings who are shepherding the whole population over a cliff. It’s just extraordinary,’ he declares.

But 57-year-old Mellon is clearly reluctant to be drawn into British politics. ‘I am based in the Isle of Man and my businesses are based there, so I can’t vote in the UK and I wouldn’t want to,’ he says.

I’m younger than Warren Buffett, and I don’t want to drink Cherry Coke and live in the same house I bought in the 1950s

We have met in a City outlet of a well-known coffee shop chain. Mellon gestures towards the counter. ‘There’s a lost generation in Europe and it’s working in places like this for £7 a hour,’ he says mournfully.

But Mellon frequents places like this a lot. ‘I use cafes as my office,’ he says. ‘I wake up and spend the whole morning in somewhere like this holding meetings.’

Mellon spends his mornings in this cafe whenever he is in London. ‘I speak Spanish and the Spanish woman at the counter here gives me free tea,’ he explains.

Speaking Spanish is helpful for his other home in Ibiza, where he spends about a third of the year. But the Isle of Man is his main home, a territory which conveniently levies no capital gains tax on its residents.

He began his career as a fund manager in Hong Kong, but he regards his investment in UraMin, a uranium mining business, as his big success. ‘That was $100,000 to $2.5 billion in two years. Never to be replicated. We didn’t make $2.5billion – we didn’t own it all, it was a public company – but that was a good investment.’ In fact, Mellon made about £25million.

That success was in 2007, but he also admits to making mistakes, notably his interest in Speymill, a property company with sizeable investments in Germany – at one point the company owned almost 50,000 apartments in Berlin. It was hit by the financial crisis and Mellon lost millions, but still much of his money is tied up in German property. But now his focus for the future is technology and life sciences. He has written a book – called Fast Forward – with co-author Al Chalabi, examining the state of industry, technology and demographics around the world.

On this subject Mellon, who like Prime Minister David Cameron read PPE at Oxford, is garrulous and unstoppable. He spills out a series of facts and figures. Among them is the view that life expectancy is about to shoot ahead in developed markets and that driverless cars will be commonplace in ten to 15 years.

High flyer: Jim Mellon with his private jet on the Isle of Man 

He waves towards the London street outside the window. ‘All these people you see on scooters learning The Knowledge. They are wasting their time. They are not going to have a job in 15 years’ time,’ he says, convinced that various technologies from mobile phone apps for ordering a cab to those driverless cars will make the London black cab redundant.

He tips US network technology company Cisco as one of his favourites and even the likes of Hewlett-Packard have a future he argues, because behind their ageing product lines they own valuable technology in the most advanced forms of memory storage.

‘They are called memristors,’ Mellon enthuses. ‘They mean that one day you will be able to have a phone like this (he holds up his iPhone) and it will have enough memory to record every moment of your entire life.’

In the digital sphere Mellon, who has 386,000 followers on Twitter, believes giants like Google and Amazon are already vacuuming up the most promising smaller firms. So if you want to buy into the next phase of the digital revolution, you may as well buy shares in one of those global tech giants.

Mellon reckons the real opportunities are in life sciences, because here medical and pharmaceutical technology is still undervalued.

He is convinced that the developed world will soon start to enjoy not merely much longer life but a better quality of old age. ‘Not just elderly, but well-derly,’ he says.

An active old age seems to be what Mellon aspires to himself. As for that description of him as Britain’s answer to Buffett, he has one word: ‘That’s bull***t,’ he says. ‘I am younger than him and I have only a fraction of his wealth.’ And then he points out another key difference. He does not follow Buffett’s famously suburban lifestyle.

‘The other thing is I want to enjoy what I have – I don’t want to spend my life drinking Cherry Coke and living in the same house I bought in the 1950s.’

And with that he heads for the airport to fly to Thailand.