Richard Caring bought Annabel’s and four other Mayfair clubs for a reported £90–95 million in 2007, and in April 2026 he sold a majority of the business that holds them in a deal valued at more than £1.4 billion.
A note on method, because the numbers in this story misbehave. Two of the headline figures, the 2007 purchase price and the 2018 cost of moving the club two doors along Berkeley Square, are reported differently by otherwise reputable outlets, so both appear here as ranges with both sources named. No turnover or profit figure for the current operating entity is used, because no primary Companies House filing was located for it in this research pass. Every figure below carries the name of whoever published it.
£1.4bn
The short answer to who owns Annabel’s in 2026: Abu Dhabi holds the majority, and Richard Caring still runs it. In April 2026, a unit of International Holding Company acquired a majority stake in Caring’s hospitality assets in a deal reported at more than £1 billion, around $1.4 billion, according to Arabian Gulf Business Insight. The buyer was Diafa, an IHC affiliate controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the UAE’s national security advisor and brother of the country’s president. The package went well beyond the club: Scott’s, The Ivy, Sexy Fish, Harry’s Bar, George and Mark’s Club all travelled with it.
Caring, 77 at the time of the reporting, remains Executive Chairman, charged with international expansion alongside Diafa. Caproasia put IHC’s market value at around $233 billion and reported that Sheikh Tahnoon oversees a $1.3 trillion portfolio, including the UAE’s roughly $790 billion sovereign wealth fund.
Most of the explainers still indexed online stop in 2007. They are nineteen years and one continent out of date.
£90m–£95m
Caring bought the Birley Group from Mark Birley in June 2007, after roughly a year of negotiation, Estates Gazette reported. Five clubs changed hands at once: Annabel’s, Mark’s Club, Harry’s Bar, George and the Bath & Racquets Club, assembled by Birley between 1963 and 2001 at a rate of roughly one a decade. MCA Insight reported the price as £90 million; PropertyEU reported £95 million. Nobody has reconciled the two, and the parties never published a figure.
Birley died later the same year, having sold the thing he was famous for and then not outlived the sale by long. His children, Robin and India Jane, had redesigned and relaunched Annabel’s in 2003 during their father’s declining health, with India Jane managing it alone from 2006 after an estrangement from her brother. Both left after the sale.
The founder’s own name never went on a door at Annabel’s. His first wife’s did.
£750 a year
Here is the detail that explains why the club was worth that kind of money to a buyer and almost nothing to an accountant. At the point of the 2007 sale, Annabel’s had 9,000 members paying £750 a year and generated profits of close to £1 million annually, according to Estates Gazette. Nine thousand people, a basement, and a seven-figure profit that a mid-sized dental group would recognise.
Caring was not buying the profit. He was buying the list, the lease and the name, and a reported £90–95 million for a million a year is a multiple that only makes sense if you intend to change the business. Within eleven years he had moved it.
26,000 sq ft
Annabel’s opened on 4 June 1963 in the basement of 44 Berkeley Square, in space leased from John Aspinall’s Clermont Club, which had itself arrived at the address a year earlier. Mark Birley named it for his wife, Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart, later Lady Annabel Goldsmith after her marriage to Sir James Goldsmith.
It left in February 2018 and reopened the same year at 46 Berkeley Square, a Grade I-listed Georgian townhouse two doors away, across multiple floors reported at more than 26,000 sq ft, a scale of space that turned a basement into a building. The freehold of 45 and 46 Berkeley Square is held by Berkeley Square Holdings Group, a company registered in the British Virgin Islands and owned by the President of the United Arab Emirates.
So the club’s landlord was already Emirati eight years before its majority shareholder became Emirati. The two facts are separate, and they sit on the same square.
£55m–£65m
The move was the most expensive thing anyone has done to Annabel’s, and the price of it depends on who you read. Oracle of Time reported the relocation at £55 million; the Sincura Group has put it at £65 million. Neither figure comes from a filing, and the operator has never published one.
Guillaume Glipa was Executive Director of The Birley Clubs at the time of the move, overseeing the handover from a room everyone knew to a house nobody had seen. Country & Town House covered the reopening as a return rather than a replacement, which is the trick the project had to pull: the same membership, four floors higher, in a listed Georgian shell.
Two addresses, two doors apart, sixty-three years, one name.
69 founders
At the relocation, the club was reported to have 1,000 members, a waiting list of 14,000 prospective ones, and 69 surviving founder members from 1963. Those three numbers circulate widely and have not been verified here against a primary source, so treat them as the texture of the story rather than its spine.
The directional point survives the caveat. Membership went from 9,000 at the 2007 sale to a reported four figures at the 2018 reopening, which is a different business model wearing the same name: fewer people, paying more, in more square footage. Scarcity was manufactured, then priced.
£3,750 a year
Spear’s, surveying London’s private members’ clubs in January 2026, published Annabel’s rates as £3,750 a year with an £1,850 joining fee, and a discounted under-35 tier at £2,250 a year with a £600 joining fee. Other recent listings disagree: the Sincura Group and The Handbook have each quoted £3,250 plus £1,250. Annabel’s does not publish an official rate card, which is why no two outlets print the same number and why anyone quoting a precise figure without a date is guessing.
Set the Spear’s figure against the £750 annual fee reported at the 2007 sale and the annual cost of membership has multiplied five times in nineteen years. The joining fee alone now exceeds two years of the 2007 subscription.
The under-35 rate is the most interesting line on the sheet. It is a succession policy with a price on it.
£975m
The most recent figure attached to Caring himself is a net worth of £975 million, placing him 164th in Britain on the 2025 Sunday Times Rich List, as summarised by the Clubland newsletter rather than verified here against the Rich List itself. It is a single-sourced number, it predates the April 2026 transaction, and no revised figure reflecting the sale has been published with a name on it.
Which means the honest answer to “what is Richard Caring worth in 2026” is that nobody credible has said since April. He sold a majority of a hospitality empire reported at £1.4 billion and kept the chair, the expansion mandate and an unquantified minority. The Rich List will catch up. It has not yet.
0 filings
There is no verified Companies House filing in this piece because none was located for the relevant Annabel’s or Birley Clubs operating entity in the research for it. That matters more than it sounds. Every turnover, profit and debt figure you will find attached to Annabel’s online is an estimate by a third party, not a set of filed accounts, and the 2007 profit figure quoted above is a press report of the Birley era rather than a document.
Private clubs are, structurally, among the least legible businesses in London: the revenue is subscriptions and covers, the asset is a leasehold interior, and the value is a list of names that appears on no balance sheet. A reported £1.4 billion changed hands in April 2026 for a portfolio built on exactly that.
What changes for members
Nothing visible, on the available evidence. Caring stays Executive Chairman and leads the international expansion with Diafa, per Arabian Gulf Business Insight’s account of the deal; Patricia Caring, whom he married in 2018, has been co-chair of The Birley Clubs since May 2020. The clubs that moved into Abu Dhabi ownership are the same five Mark Birley opened between 1963 and 2001, plus the restaurants Caring added himself, and the stated plan is more of them in more countries rather than fewer of them in Mayfair.
The freehold at 46 Berkeley Square belongs to a company owned by the President of the UAE. The majority of the business inside it belongs to his brother’s conglomerate. The name on the door still belongs to Mark Birley’s first wife.
Cover photograph via Superyachtfan.
