Clothing magnate and infrastructure boss top Spain’s 2014 rich list

The founder of clothing giant Inditex, Amancio Ortega, continues to top the list of the richest people in Spain with a fortune of €46 billion, according to the Spanish edition of Forbes magazine.

The biggest shareholders in infrastructure conglomerate Ferrovial, Rafael del Pino and his family, sit in second place with €6.4 billion, pushing the head of the Mercadona supermarket chain, Juan Roig, down to third with €6 billion, says the publication.

The Forbes list measures the wealth of the super rich according to public declarations of their assets. In the case of Ortega, for instance, this includes the value of his 59.2-percent stake in Inditex, the capital he has in real estate company Ponte Gadea and other business activities, but not personal assets such as houses, jewelry, yachts and current accounts, as these are privately owned, says the editor of Forbes’ Spanish edition, Andrés Rodríguez. In short, it is a ranking of multi-millionaires by their business wealth.

According to the publication’s latest calculations, which will later be used to compile Forbes’ global rich list, the 100 biggest fortunes in Spain total €164.424 billion, which is equivalent to 15.6 percent of Spanish GDP. The figures show that the country’s richest people have managed to increase their wealth by 9.2 percent in the last year.

One of the key elements of the list are equity investments. Amancio Ortega’s fortune has dropped by €1.7 billion compared with 2013 because the average price of shares in Inditex, which encompasses brands such as Zara, Bershka and Massimo Dutti, has dropped in that time. The entry of Ferrovial president Rafael del Pino and his family into the top three is also a result of the good performance of the company’s shares.