Sunday Times Rich List

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The Sunday Times Rich List is a list of the 1,000 most wealthy people or families in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, updated annually in April and published by British national Sunday newspaper The Sunday Times since 1989.

The list is not limited to British citizens and it includes individuals and families born overseas but who predominantly work and/or live in Britain. This excludes some individuals with prominent financial assets in Britain such as Rupert Murdoch (owner of The Times and The Sunday Times).

[edit] Criticism and evaluation

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The Sunday Times website states "We measure identifiable wealth, whether land, property, racehorses, art or significant shares in publicly quoted companies. We exclude bank accounts — to which we have no access... We try to give due consideration to liabilities." See http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2108-1067298,00.html

The relevant information will often not be in the public sphere, in many cases, the figures must be based on informed gossip and informed guesswork; in other cases, wild guesswork. So the figures given should not be regarded as reliable. The precision of the figures given, combined with precise ranking, gives a spurious impression of accuracy.

Thus the list at one time ranked Robert Maxwell above Rupert Murdoch, though the former was actually insolvent. J. K. Rowling has claimed that it values her absurdly based on overestimations of the value of rights.

Analysis of social trends based on one year's list, or based on changes in the list from one year to another is for this reason necessarily based on very insecure foundations.