Inditex founder takes home €477m dividend on back of 2013 results

The founder of Spanish clothing giant Inditex, Amancio Ortega, will go to bed tonight €447 million richer after receiving the last payment of his dividend for the year. In total, he has taken home €894.4 million in 2014 from the distribution of the group’s profits among its shareholders. Through the companies Gartler and Partler, Ortega holds 59.294% of the textile multinational, which includes brands such as Zara, Bershka and Massimo Dutti.

The Spanish businessman, who is known for avoiding the limelight, leads the ranking of Europe’s richest people, as compiled by Swiss bank Julius Baer, with a fortune of €48 billion. His daughter Sandra Ortega is the seventh-richest woman on the continent with a fortune of €5.2 billion.

Second on the European rich list is Swedish businessman Ingvar Kamprad, founder of Ikea, with €34.3 billion, and French LVMH owner Bernard Arnault, with €24.9 billion.

Inditex posted net profits of €2.377 billion in the 2013-2014 tax year (which runs from February 1 to January 31), a 1% increase compared to the previous 12 months. Sales came in at €16.724 billion, which represents a rise of 5%.

The group has its origins in a workshop making dressing gowns that Ortega founded in 1963. His company grew into a distributor in the 1970s before opening the first Zara store in A Coruña, Galicia in 1975. The Inditex holding company was set up in 1985, and began to expand internationally in the late 1980s.