Sir Richard Branson has said he will mortgage his private Caribbean island to raise money to help his Virgin Group empire, as he pleaded with the UK government to step in and save his Virgin Atlantic airline from collapse.
Branson, who is the UK’s seventh-richest person with an estimated €5.35 billion fortune, and has lived tax-free on Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands for the last 14 years, promised in a public blog post that he would “raise as much money against the island as possible to save as many jobs as possible”.
Branson, 69, made the pledge as he tried to convince the government to give his airline a €568 million loan to help it through the “devastating impact this pandemic continues to have”.