Euro Garages brothers' Asian business award

After adding £1bn to their personal net worth over the course of 12 months, the Issa brothers have won the Asian Business of the Year award.

Mohsin and Zuber Issa, who founded Euro Garages, climbed 25 places on the UK's Asian rich list. The increase from £300m to £1.3bn sees them ranked joined ninth on the list topped by the Hindujas. The launch of the list coincided with the Asian Business Awards, where Blackburn-headquartered Euro Garages was named overall Asian Business of the Year. The Issas collected the award at a gala event, attended by Dinesh K Patnaik, deputy high commissioner, high commission of India.

Euro Garages has grown from incredibly modest beginnings, with one slightly worn petrol station in 2001, a loan of £150,000 and then almost on a whim, a decision to put a decent shop inside it. Since then, they have never looked back and have become not only one of the foremost UK companies, through their Euro Garages outfit, but one of Europe’s leading concerns in this sector - as EG Group.

EG Group looks set to increase to more than 3,000 petrol stations across Europe - a new deal announced in January sees EG tying up with the Esso brand to increase their presence across the Benelux nations. The group has also announced a number of other expansion programmes.

The group works with an incredible array of household brand names - from Greggs, Starbucks, and KFC to Carrefour, Louis Delhaize (a Belgian supermarket brand) through to oil majors, Shell, BP and Esso. It has brokered major deals with these retail concerns and global energy powerhouses, and is probably the no1 UK company doing this at home and abroad.

The Asian Rich List, which is published by Asian Media Group, shows the combined overall net worth of the featured 101 UK based millionaires has topped the £80.2bn mark, (an increase of just under £11bn since last year), with the top 10 being valued at a total of £54.25bn and representing 68 per cent of the total figure.