Company which provides Government with asylum seeker accommodation raking in astonishing £4.8m a day
A COMPANY which provides the Government with asylum-seeker accommodation is raking in £4.8million per day.
It could see Graham King, 57 — boss of Clearsprings Ready Homes — become the immigration industry’s first billionaire.
The Essex-based business was paid £1.74billion last year — an increase of £400million on the previous 12 months — which it said was all down to the refugee crisis.
It houses migrants in hotels, old military barracks and flats.
Mr King has a reported £750million fortune and this year appeared on the Sunday Times Rich list for the first time, as Britain’s 221st wealthiest person.
A company report this week revealed Clearsprings made a profit of £91.2million last year and paid £90million in dividends to a holding company controlled by King.
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It stated: “The company’s turnover was entirely in the UK and related mainly to the provision of accommodation, support and transport to asylum-seekers.”
Clearsprings’ contracts with the Home Office run until September 2029 — meaning Mr King could boost his wealth to more than £1billion by the end of the decade.
Previously, Mr King ran a caravan park in Canvey Island, Essex, in the 2000s.
But his career took a turn when he used an old cinema to house refugees.
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It led to a change of direction in the business as migration boomed during the Tony Blair years.
He moved with his Austrian-born wife Carin to a 60-acre listed farmhouse in Chappel, near Colchester.
They sent their two young children to Felsted, a £46,000-a-year boarding school and enjoyed regular expensive ski holidays.
Mr King is now thought to live abroad and has another company, Bespoke Strategy Solutions, based in the United Arab Emirates.
Former Tory minister Neil O’Brien said of the eye-watering profits: “Labour’s terrible decision to scrap the only scheme we had to get people deported who shouldn’t be here is already proving to have disastrous effects with the numbers crossing the Channel even higher.
“Nothing they are doing is going to fix the problem and so taxpayers are going to face a huge welfare bill.
“We’re now seeing that at least some people are making huge profits out of Labour’s catastrophic failure on illegal immigration and taxpayers are the ones who are going to be footing the bill.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “Our asylum accommodation contracts contain a profit-share device so that profits above the agreed margins come back to us.”
Clearsprings Ready Homes were approached for comment.
