UK Horse Racing Tips

Born in Enfield, Greater London in 1952, Terry Ramsden rose to prominence in the early Eighties. He amassed a multi-million pound fortune by speculating on the Japanese stock market and gambling heavily, particularly on horse racing. With his trademark shoulder-length hair and shiny suits, Ramsden was every inch the archetypal self-made Essex man of the Thatcherite era and made no secret of his wealth.

In 1985, Ramsden reportedly won £2 million on the filly Katies, whom he had bought for £500,000 immediately before her victory, at 20/1, in the Irish 1,000 Guineas at the Curragh. By 1987, the annual turnover of Glen International, an Edinburgh-based company that Ramsden had purchased three years earlier, had increased to a satggering £3.5 billion. While he wasn’t a casino goer, there’s no doubting that he had the equivalent of a high roller mentality of the likes you might find on OnlineCasinoSnoop.com . He had a go hard or go home outlook.

Events did later take a turn for the worse for this larger than life character. With eventual  reported gambling losses of £58 million between 1985 and 1988, Ramsden suffered a further setback when so-called ‘Black Monday, on October 19, 1987, rocked global financial markets and wiped hundreds of millions of pounds of the value of his securities. Glen International collapsed, with debts of £98 million, and Ramsden fled to the United States to escape his creditors, only to be arrested, and jailed, in Los Angeles in 1991 at the request of the Serious Fraud Office. Within a month of his return to Britain, in February, 1992, Ramsden was declared bankrupt, with total debts of nearly £100 million, including over £21 million owed to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

The following year, he admitted ‘recklessly inducing fresh investment’ in Glen International and received a two-year suspended sentence and, in 1998, was convicted of attempting to conceal £300,000 from his creditors and sentenced to twenty-one months’ imprisonment, of which he served ten. Ramsden was released from prison, to very little fanfare, in 1999 and, although cleared by the Jockey Club to attend racecourses and own racehorses again in 2003, he will be remembered as the man who won, and lost, £150 million in his heyday. Better to have such a wild tale to tell than live life in the slow lane though!

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