He became rich housing refugees. Who is the asylum millionaire?

Canvey Island’s tidal mudflats lie at the edge of the Thames estuary, 30 miles east of London. It was here among the reclaimed fields and creeks that Jack King, a shed salesman from Romford, moved his young family in the early 1960s. The entrepreneur and football fanatic bought a failing caravan holiday park from the council and turned it into a successful mobile home business, Kings Park, which he sold for £32 million in 2007. It sealed the family’s fortunes.

His son Graham was determined to follow in his father’s footsteps. He spent years working for Jack — who also owned a taxi company and a car dealership as well as nightclubs hosting performers including Shirley Bassey and Tommy Cooper — before striking out on his own. In 1999 Graham launched the property company Clearsprings.

In the decades since, Clearsprings has won a series of lucrative government contracts to provide short-term accommodation, mostly for asylum seekers. Surging numbers of refugees — many from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, some desperately crammed into small boats — more than doubled the firm’s profits to £62.5 million for the year ending January 2023. Such is the success of his business — in which he has a 97 per cent stake — that Graham, 57, has made his debut on The Sunday Times Rich List with an estimated wealth of £750 million.

Little is known about Graham, who runs Clearsprings from a nondescript blue office building next to a dual carriageway near Southend-on-Sea. Few of the King family remain on Canvey Island. His mum died in the 1970s and Jack died in 2016. Of Graham’s four siblings, one brother, Dennis, died in the 1980s, the other, Jeff, lives in Monaco and one sister, Susan, in Mallorca; only his sister Linda, a hairdresser, still lives locally.

The Kings may be mostly gone from Canvey — whose motto is Ex mare dei gratia, meaning “From the sea by the grace of God” — but they are far from forgotten. For a while the family helped to finance Canvey Island FC’s “golden spell” between 1992 and 2006, when Jeff was the manager of the local non-league football team. They reached the third round of the FA Cup in 2002, bowing out to Burnley. The club has a Jack King stand in tribute.

A fashionable seaside resort during the Victorian era, Canvey is now mostly given over to Essex’s industrial overspill. “It’s a lovely community, very insular. There are a few families that are household names, where you get just as much hearsay as facts about them,” one member of the local Conservative club told me. “The Kings were one of them. I’ve heard many fairytales, both good and bad.”

John Pring, an estate agent who has worked with the family, says “the Kings are and have been an important family on Canvey. The whole family is entrepreneurial — they certainly count their pennies.”

In the late 1990s Jack invited Pring to fly in the family’s private jet for a lunch in Brussels. Graham, who was in his early thirties at the time, was flying the plane.

“We landed at the airport, got in a cab, went to the restaurant and drank champagne — not the pilot, I hasten to add — then Graham flew us back,” Pring recalls. “He asked me to sit next to him up front. Bloody hell, that was terrifying.”

Soon afterwards, Pring claims, the Kings asked him to help write a business plan. Graham had heard about a hotel owner renting out his rooms to the government to house asylum seekers.

“Jack came to me and said, ‘The government is asking people to tender for this type of work. Graham thinks there’s an opportunity.’ The idea was to buy property, rent it to the government and manage it for them. So I put together this page and a half of A4 as to why Clearsprings should be suitable.” The idea may have put Graham on track to becoming a billionaire — though Clearsprings did not confirm Pring’s account. “It was all very basic,” Pring says. “I’m not taking any credit.”

But Graham’s financial success has not come without controversy. In 2019 Clearsprings was awarded contracts worth £996 million to provide temporary accommodation for asylum seekers in Wales and the south of England until 2029. Inspectors in 2021 described two of its sites — Napier Barracks in Kent and Penally Camp in Pembrokeshire — as filthy and having “decrepit”, “impoverished” and “run-down” conditions. About a third of the residents consulted said they had mental health problems. The inspectors found Home Office communication to be “poor”, with “fundamental failures of leadership and planning”.

Last year more than 70 people, including children, slept on the street in protest at two Clearsprings-run hotels in London, claiming they had been crammed into tiny rooms without enough beds, while a report by Open Democracy last year found that two thirds of 1,400 complaints about hotel accommodation made to the Migrant Help charity were about properties managed by Clearsprings. The group has since been charged with 39 breaches of the Housing Act 2004 in a prosecution brought by Swindon Borough Council, to which they have pleaded not guilty.

From October the government has reduced the number of people staying in “asylum hotels” by 36 per cent. However, it is still spending £8.2 million a day on accommodation run by Clearsprings and other companies. Almost all of Clearsprings’s £1.3 billion revenues in 2022 — more than £3.5 million a day — stemmed from the two ten-year contracts with the Home Office to house arrivals.

After Clearsprings launched, Graham’s original business partner, Michael Bilkus, took him to the High Court over a verbal agreement regarding the future ownership and control of the company. The legal battle was settled in 2003 with Bilkus agreeing to sell his shares (50 per cent) to King after it was independently valued.

For Pring, the man who says he wrote that first business plan, there is lingering regret about how his partnership with the Kings turned out. Pring says he went into a separate business with Graham and Jeff when they each paid £1 million for Thorney Bay, another local mobile home park, in 2000. Pring says he failed to establish a shareholders’ agreement with them before making the deal, which meant he “lobbed everything I had into a company that I couldn’t take a salary from”. He asked the Kings if they could pay him a salary for running the project but they declined and, because he had run up personal debt and needed money, he let them buy him out.

He admits to naivety. “It’s a sore subject. I didn’t protect myself,” he says. “I blame myself and nobody else. That’s why I’m still working at 78.” He wishes he could have remained a 50 per cent shareholder, as the Kings sold it recently for “millions and millions”.

Graham, meanwhile, appears to have left Canvey Island behind. In 2000 he and his Austrian-born wife, Carin, moved to a 60-acre listed farmhouse in a far more bucolic part of Essex, the village of Chappel, near Colchester, with their two young children, who were both educated at Felsted, a £46,000-a-year boarding school. The family enjoyed regular skiing holidays, with Carin once tweeting that Graham “skis like a rocket”. But the good times did not last and Graham and Carin have long been separated.

Villagers say they haven’t seen Graham for several years and speculate he now lives in London or abroad. “The family was rich on Canvey Island and we heard he [Graham] had a reputation, but he didn’t bring it here with him,” according to a neighbour, James Chamley, who grazes sheep on 20 acres of land now owned by Carin. “He used to take me for curry, he was as good as gold. He had a black dog he used to walk. He supported Chelsea, I remember that. We take people as they come — I don’t care if he’s got £50 million.”

Back on Canvey, Robert Craske, a 77-year-old retired car dealer who was named as an original secretary of Clearsprings, is less sanguine. He claims he did it as a favour to Jack because he was renting garage space from him at the time.

“I’ve known the family for donkey’s years. Jack started with nothing. He was good company, a very charming man, [but he] could be nasty. I felt a little bit obliged [when asked to be secretary] and Jack said, ‘Well, it’s to help Graham.’ I never got a penny out of them. I was a bit resentful of that. There was abuse being thrown about that they were housing immigrants and I was running a business and I thought, ‘I want to be out of this.’ Graham was a good kid, though.

“There’s a lot of resentment — jealousy, I should think. Good luck to him, his whole business is built on renting properties out [for asylum seekers]. You and I are paying for it. Given the opportunity, I suppose we would all do it.”

Both Clearsprings and Michael Bilkus declined to comment.