Peter Hargreaves

Our aim is to help the clients help themselves, not to tell them what to think.

Money in property is dead money. It doesn't help the country. It's funny how the U.K., Ireland and Spain are the most property-obsessed nations in Europe and yet are also the ones suffering the most.

There is an old adage that the quickest way to drop your tax take is to increase taxes. If capital gains tax is going to be 50 percent, my contingent capital gains tax is going to be 250 million pounds.

I think I've been a moderately good boss. I've made a lot of people extremely wealthy - I think we've created 30 millionaires.

We need an honest politician in charge who doesn't care whether they are re-elected and is prepared to make the unpopular decisions.

The older you get and the wealthier you get, the more complicated life becomes. That's why I have as few material assets as possible. Every material thing you have is more hassle.

I knew my successor would be better than me for the next stage of the company's life. And it was a relief - I'd been doing it for 30 years. My only worry was what the hell I was going to do with my time.

I love criticism. Equitable Life went down because management wouldn't brook criticism, but if you are in business, you have to hear what's going wrong.

People in retail banks are not smart. They have a business model that's quite difficult to not make money out of - but still they somehow manage it.

The Conservatives, along with Labour, I don't think understand what it is like to run a business.

We are one of only two FTSE 100 companies which do not use offshore or other tax avoidance arrangements. In fact, we are probably one of the highest taxpaying companies in the index.

I couldn't have predicted the business would be worth so much. I could see that we would have this sort of market share, but I didn't realise the numbers would be so large.