David Ross

He is a grandson of Carl Ross, who created one of the UK's largest commercial fishing firms from the family business, which eventually became Ross Group, and took over the Great Grimsby Coal, Salt and Tanning Company (known as Cosalt), which was founded in 1873 as a co-operative that supplied fishing fleets.

Both businesses were listed on the London Stock Exchange.

Ross was educated at Uppingham School.

At the age of 16, his father sent him to work on a building site in Algeria, which he later described: "It was a defining moment because it was so bad I had to get away from it and be able to control my destiny".

David Peter John Ross (born 10 July 1965) is an English millionaire businessman, and one of the co-founders (with Charles Dunstone and Guy Johnson) of Carphone Warehouse.

Ross was born on 10 July 1965.

Following a profits warning in October, Ross proposed to turn it into a privately owned business, offering £400,000 to have it delisted from the stock market, where it had had a presence since 1971.

Despite doubling his offer and pumping more money into the company through his investment vehicle, disaffected shareholders rejected it.

He graduated with a BA degree in law from the University of Nottingham and worked at Arthur Andersen from 1988, qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1991.

Ross had become friends with Charles Dunstone while at Uppingham.

Dunstone went on to found Carphone Warehouse from a flat in Marylebone Road, London, using £6000 of his savings.

Two years later, he asked Ross to join the business as finance director.

Four years later, the business had twenty stores and thereafter continued to grow rapidly through a process of both acquisition and internal development.

While Dunstone became the public face of Carphone Warehouse, Ross (described by Dunstone as his "secret weapon" ), developed and drove the high-street retail footprint of the company by buying Tandy in the UK, and developing markets in Europe and the United States.

Ross was finance director from 1991 until 1996 and then joint-chief operating officer of the company until 2003.

When Ross assisted the IPO of Carphone Warehouse in 2000, the company had been so successful that the partners had not needed to borrow or involve outsiders: Dunstone owned half, Ross a third, and Guy Johnson most of the rest.

He was the chairman of National Express from 2001 and also had directorships of several other companies, including the publishing and newspaper group Trinity Mirror, Big Yellow Storage and Frontiers Capital.

A private investment business called Kandahar had been formed by Ross, comprising a team that had gained much experience of the UK high street property market as the number of Carphone Warehouse stores had grown.

The business also expanded into other telecommunications areas, establishing the TalkTalk ISP in 2003 and taking over other providers such as AOL.

He started to reduce his role from 2003, was appointed deputy chairman in July 2005 and by 2008 was a non-executive director.

The successful involvement of Ross in Carphone Warehouse created a demand for his services at other businesses.

In 2006, Ross set up a commercial property joint venture with the Morgan Stanley investment bank.

His 50 per cent investment in the venture, which was known as Kandahar Real Estate Ltd, came from injecting the one-million square foot high-street private property portfolio of Kandahar, while Morgan Stanley injected the newly completed Drake Circus Shopping Centre in Plymouth.

The joint venture was worth £500 million but hit problems soon after due to the financial crisis of 2007–08; in 2007 it had to arrange a £460 million refinancing deal through the HBOS bank.

He took on the role in 2007 and had a 12-month break between 2008 and 2009 due to the problems relating to his pledging of shares as collateral, which had included those he held in Cosalt itself.

At the peak of his business interests in 2008, Ross was one of the 100 richest people in the United Kingdom.

In 2008, Forbes ranked him #843 in the world's richest billionaires; his net worth was estimated at US$1.4 billion.

Ross resigned from Carphone Warehouse, National Express and Big Yellow in December 2008 after using a large proportion of his shares in the businesses as collateral for personal loans without informing the companies, which is a breach of stock market rules.

Shortly afterwards, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) said that the rules on the issue, governed by the EU Market Abuse Directive, were unclear and inconsistently applied across the European Union.

Although noting that the practice was also restricted by disclosure rules of the stock market's Listing Rules, the FSA said that other directors had used their shares in a similar fashion and offered a short amnesty for declarations to be made by any directors who might have engaged in such practices.

The Drake Circus shopping centre, which was the largest asset in the Kandahar portfolio, was sold to British Land in January 2011 for £240m.

Other sales followed as the portfolio was divested during the year, including shopping centres in Bishops Stortford, Caterham, Ipswich and Market Harborough.

Like his grandfather and father before him, Ross was chairman of Cosalt, which by his time had become primarily a group of companies involved in offshore safety.

Despite selling its marine division to raise £27 million, the company was in dire financial circumstances by 2011, when Ross held 15 per cent of the shares and had loaned it money.

Some individual shareholders tried in December 2012 to have the Takeover Panel and Financial Services Authority investigate Ross amid claims that he had abused his position in an attempt to buy the business cheaply.

Ross said that he had acted altruistically and that the company's pension fund liabilities were now twice its value.

By that time, trading in shares had been suspended due to a failure to comply with regulatory requirements by April that year.

Unable to obtain funding from existing or new lenders, or by a deal with pension fund trustees, the company was put into administration in February 2013.

In April 2015, The Sunday Times estimated his net worth at £1.0 billion.

In the 2020 edition of the Sunday Times Rich List, his net worth was estimated at £642 million, a £26 million decrease from the previous year.