

“People don’t address you by your net worth, they call you by your name, he said. Empire of Pain is an attentive history of the family, and gathers up evidence of how the Sacklers were aware of the ways in which Ox圜ontin drove the opioid-abuse epidemic how, in fact, they. The 72-year-old entrepreneur told the BBC that if there was anything he resented in life, it was the tag of billionaire. The government refused the request for a taxpayer-funded bailout and instead the Virgin Group injected £200m into Virgin Atlantic as part of a £900m rescue package that also included support from shareholders and some of the airline’s suppliers. A narrative account of how a prominent wealthy family sponsored the creation and marketing of one of the most commonly prescribed and addictive painkillers of the opioid crisis. However, the move led to widespread criticism at the time, with the Labour deputy leader, Angela Rayner, tweeting: “Richard flog your private island and pay your staff, we are in unprecedented times here.” Empire of Pain: The secret history of the Sackler dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe. What we were concerned to do is try to get support from government, not gifts from government but underwriting loans so the cost to the airline … was not prohibitive.”īranson, who is one of the richest people in the UK, made the plea for a Treasury bailout from his private Necker island in the Caribbean, after the British airline easyJet secured a £600m loan from the government. It’s pretty difficult to explain to people when everybody is hurting.

The entrepreneur said he found the media backlash “painful” when his Virgin Group asked the UK government for a £500m loan to help the airline Virgin Atlantic in April 2020. In the interview with the BBC’s Amol Rajan, Branson said he personally lost about £1.5bn during the pandemic.
