City Spy previously reported on some questionable calculations over the Issa brothers’ appearance on the Sunday Times Rich List.
As it turns out, that wasn’t the only figure in the annual league table of squillionaires in doubt.
A spokesperson from the billionaire Swire family got in touch with Spy this week, pointing out he had demanded a correction from the ST. Apparently, someone misread a corporate filing and thought the family was worth more than £17 billion, when the correct figure is less than £10 billion…a little more than a simple rounding error.
Not only did the poor flack have to get the ST to change the figure, but since the family had appeared in the top ten list, that meant going round half of Fleet Street to track down all the news websites that had quoted it. He didn’t seem impressed.
“They must have been completely asleep, not asking how the family had seemingly increased its wealth by 100 percent in a year,” he said.
“You’d think that might have shown up in their research as something worth looking into and reporting on separately.”
Quite.
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