Nick Leslau

Nick Leslau (born 18 August 1959) is an English commercial property investor and the chairman and chief executive of Prestbury Investment Holdings Limited, and chairman of Prestbury Investments LLP. He is a 30 percent shareholder in Prestbury's AIM listed Secure Income REIT. He has an estimated net worth of £400 million. Secure Income REIT owns 20 private hospitals and 55 Travelodge hotels in the UK.

Early life The son of a jeweller and part-time art historian, his parents divorced when he was nine. His mother subsequently worked full-time so that Leslau could be educated at a preparatory school in Hampstead, and at Mill Hill School. Leslau left the University of Warwick where he was studying German, to study quantity surveying.

Career After meeting Sam Rosen, Leslau joined the ground rent company of commodities traders Burford Group. He had completed a degree in estate management at South Bank University, and became a Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) qualified and registered chartered surveyor with Burford. At age 23, he became CEO of Burford Estate & Property.

Wanting to move further into property, Leslau contacted Nigel Wray to engineer a reverse takeover of Wray's listed company Chartsearch in 1986 for £8 million. However, a poor deal with Sega in the creation of SegaWorld as an anchor tenant meant the company went through some difficult times.

In 2011, Leslau bought the London marina St Katharine Docks for £156 million through subsidiary Max Property Group. In 2014, he sold it to the Blackstone Group for nearly £450 million.

Political activity Leslau has donated to the Conservative Party, and was a signatory to a letter to The Daily Telegraph during the 2015 United Kingdom general election campaign; which praised the party's economic policies, and claimed that a Labour government under Ed Miliband would "threaten jobs and deter investment".

Leslau pledged to end donations to the Conservatives due to the government's ban on evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, stating that: "I think the flippancy with which the property industry has been treated has been narrow-minded".

Personal life Leslau and his wife Maxine have been married for over 30 years, the couple have three sons. In 2019, he stepped down from the board of Saracens after 21 years as board director.

In early 2008, Leslau took part in the Channel 4 programme Secret Millionaire, giving away £225,000 in a ten-day visit to Possilpark, Glasgow.

Leslau is Jewish.