SOUTH AFRICA – SA dollar billionaire and philanthropist Allan Gray has died at the age of 81, his Cape Town-based investment management business said on Monday.

In 1973, Gray founded the firm, which has become one of SA’s biggest active asset managers. At the time, it was just a one-man company with Gray basing investment decisions on the difference between his assessment of the intrinsic value of a company and its share price. This approach later became the standard practice of the asset management industry.

Forbes estimated in 2017 that Gray, who obtained his undergraduate degree in accounting at Rhodes University and later an MBA at Harvard, had a net worth of $1.8bn (about R27bn), placing him just behind the likes of Patrice Motsepe and Naspers chair Koos Bekker on SA’s richest list.

– BusinessLIVE