Chris Hohn: Hedge fund boss’s pay slumps to just £42m

Hedge fund boss Chris Hohn took a £233m pay cut this year, as his fund paid out around £340m in charitable donations.

The head of TCI Fund Management, Hohn took home $53m (£42m), down from the $346m (£276m) he collected in 2023, Companies House filings have revealed.

TCI, which previously employed former prime minister Rishi Sunak between 2006 and 2009, was founded as a part philanthropic venture in 2003.

The hedge fund initially channelled a portion of its profits into the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, a charity set up by Hohn and his ex-wife.

While the firm severed its formal agreement with the charity in 2014, the investment outfit has continued to donate to the organisation, which works on a variety of causes, from slowing the transmission of HIV to combating malnutrition in children.

Hohn was paid a record-breaking £575m in 2022, which was the biggest single amount ever awarded to an individual in the UK.

This year, TCI has upped its charitable donations this year by more than five times, gifting $427m.

The hedge fund, which controls $57bn (£45bn) of investments, made $229m (£182m) in operating profit this year, down from $456m (£362m) the year before.

TCI also paid out $57m (£45m) in corporate tax, despite employing only six staff. The hedge fund has a reputation for aggressive activist investing, building stakes in US giants like Alphabet and Microsoft.

In 2023 Hohn was named “the UK’s most generous man” by The Sunday Times Rich List, having given away more than $4bn to charity throughout his life.

Hohn is also the single largest donor to climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion.

In 2019, he said: “I recently gave them £50,000 because humanity is aggressively destroying the world with climate change and there is an urgent need for us all to wake up to this fact.”