Gerald Maurice Ronson, CBE (born 27 May 1939) is a British business tycoon and convicted criminal. He became known in the UK as one of the 'Guinness Four' for his part in the Guinness share-trading fraud of the 1980s as a result of which he was convicted and imprisoned. Early life and career Ronson was born into a middle-class Jewish family. He left school aged 15 to join his father in the family furniture business, named Heron after his father Henry. The company expanded into property development, at first with small residential projects, and later with commercial and office properties. By 1967 the company was active in seven European countries and fifty-two British municipalities. In the mid-1960s Ronson brought the first self-service petrol retail outlets to the United Kingdom. Heron International By the early 1980s Heron was one of the largest private companies in the United Kingdom, with assets of over £1.5 billion. In 1989, Ronson was listed by The Times as having a net worth of £500 million. Ronson said that "The Ronson family lost $1 billion of its own money in the property crash of the early 1990s....the important thing was to rebuild." By the 1990s, Heron almost collapsed, with over £1 billion owed to 11,000 bondholders. The company survived with loans from Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Craig McCaw, Oracle Corporation's founder, Larry Ellison, and others, and went on to develop projects including Heron Tower and The Heron in the City of London and The Peak in London's Victoria. Ronson's later additional business ventures included Ronson Capital Partners, an investment firm he established to invest opportunistically in real estate assets in the UK; and Rontec Investments, a consortium comprising Snax 24, Investec and Grovepoint Capital, created to acquire the assets of Total Oil UK. Criminal conviction and the "Guinness Four" Ronson became notorious in the UK as one of the Guinness Four for his involvement in the Guinness share-trading fraud of the 1980s. He was convicted in August 1990 of one charge of conspiracy, two of false accounting, and one of theft. He was fined £5 million and given a one-year jail sentence, of which he served six months. In 2000 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that use of statements made to inspectors in the 1990 trial had been unfair, but rejected five other complaints and denied a costs application. An appeal to the Court of