Billionaire Hohn handed £60m dividend and ramps up philanthropy
Hedge fund billionaire Sir Chris Hohn gave himself a £60m dividend in 2025 and cemented his reputation as one of the world’s most generous philanthropists, dishing out nearly £600m of his investment firm’s profit to good causes.
Hohn’s TCI Fund Management was bolstered by the strong performance of its flagship funds, which carried turnover at the investment shop above $1bn (£740m) for the first time ever. In the previous 12 months to March, it generated $844m.
The improved track record allowed his firm, widely viewed as one of the UK’s most successful hedge funds, to ramp up donations to its charitable arm to $797m, a sharp increase from the $427m issued the previous year.
Hohn a critic of foreign aid cuts
The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) hands out donations to charities that help children’s development with sexual health programmes and efforts to reduce impact of climate change in developing economies.
And the $70bn TCI’s annual nine-figure donations to the foundation has propelled Hohn to become one of the world’s most recognised philanthropists. He was knighted for his services to philanthropy in 2014 and has been an outspoken critic of successive governments’ cuts to foreign aid.
After the Starmer’s administration chose to divert 0.2 per cent of GDP away from its aid budget towards defence, the financier revealed he had given an additional $328m to charitable causes to plug the gap.
Branding the cuts “very cruel”, he told The Times in August that the move, combined with a similar cut from the Treasury under Rishi Sunak from 0.7 per cent of national income to 0.5 per cent in 2021, would cost ” a lot of lives, maybe in the millions”.
Last year, TCI issued a total dividend of $81.6m over 2024/5, up from $52.2m the preceding year but lower than the huge handouts issued after previous years’ performance. Off the back of bumper returns generated over the pandemic, it issued a dividend of $689.6m, which is believed to be the largest of its kind to a UK individual.