Hollick, Clive Richard (1945- )

English business executive and Labour Party peer (from 1991). In 1996 Hollick merged his financial services and television company Mills & Allen (MAI), for £3 billion, with United Newspapers (owners of the national Express titles and the Daily Star) to form the United News & Media group. Hollick became head of the enlarged group in the same year. In 2000, following a failed merger attempt with Carlton, he sold most of his television interests and newspaper concerns to concentrate on building up his renamed United Business Media as a business information group.

Following his move into television with MAI, Hollick won the Meridian TV franchise in 1992 (with a bid of £36.6 million) and instigated a series of reportedly ruthless cutbacks. In 1992 he won the licence (with Pearson) to operate Channel 5, the UK's fifth terrestrial TV channel, purchased Anglia TV for £292 million in 1994, and the HTV franchise in 1997. Three years later his company acquired CMP (a publisher of hi-tech magazines, including the business title Information Week, and a leading online business portal) for $920 million.

Hollick's attempt to merge his company with Carlton in 2000 failed after the Competition Commission found in favour of a three-way merger proposed by the Granada group (run by Northern Irish executive Gerry Robinson). This would have caused a major reorganization of the commercial television industry, and as a result United and Carlton abandoned their plans. Hollick later sold the bulk of his company's television assets to Granada for £1.75 billion.

Despite changing his United Newspapers' political alignment (to support the Labour government) and appointing a liberal editor to appeal to younger readers, circulation figures declined. Hollick (described in the press as an ‘absentee landlord’) sold the titles to English publisher Richard Desmond for £125 million in November 2000.

The son of a French polisher, Hollick was educated at Taunton's Grammar School in Southampton, and graduated with a BA from the University of Nottingham. Hollick started his career as a graduate trainee with Hambros merchant bank in 1968, and was appointed the youngest ever corporate finance director in 1973. Hambros gave him control of ailing fringe bank J H Vavasseur (with Bank of England approval), which he used as a vehicle to create MAI in 1974, having sold the non-core property interests.

Hollick joined the Labour Party when he was 15 and was created a life peer in 1991. He was a former adviser to the shadow Trade and Industry department, is a member of the pro-Europe lobbying group, and is founder and a trustee of the Institute for Public Policy Research (a leading UK think tank).