SIR ALAN SUGAR, the nononsense star of BBC 1’s The Apprentice, is planning to leave Amstrad, the electronics company he founded nearly 40 years ago, once the merger with BSkyB is complete.

Sugar, who announced a £125m takeover of Amstrad last week, told The Sunday Times that he was in discussions with Sky over staying on as a consultant for the expanded company’s technology interests but otherwise plans to turn his attentions to growing his property business next year.

“Throughout my career I have invested in property as security and seen the electronics as the risky part of my business. I’ve got £300m of property, mostly in trophy buildings around London, and I don’t owe a penny. If this were leveraged properly it could be £3 billion overnight. I need to put these assets to work, raise equity and become a proper real-estate trader.”

Sugar, whose property vehicle is called Amsprop, said he regretted not spending more time on property while he was chairman of Tottenham Hotspur. “I wasted 10 years working hard at Tottenham and stupidly missed a golden time in property. While I was messing round with the FA, these young property guys were making fortunes. It was a waste of my time and talent.”

But Sugar believes the property boom is not over yet. “London is the focal point of a new wave of billions of pounds of cash pouring in from what used to be the Third World and is now first world. A banker told me there will be 210,000 billionaires in China in five years. The scope for London property is huge.”

But he insists he won’t be tempted to overleverage property portfolios as some other traders have done in recent years. “There’s a young man’s culture out there at the moment where they think there’s no recourse. They can borrow funds from banks, do massive transactions and if it goes wrong walk away.”

Sugar said the sale of Amstrad wouldn’t affect The Apprentice, the television show in which contestants compete for a £100,000 job with him. “The next Apprentice will most probably go to Amsprop, Amsair [his private jet company] or Viglen [the listed technology firm] and depending on skills might still go to Amstrad, as I am around for at least another year.”

Sugar, who pocketed £34.8m for his 27.9% stake in Amstrad, said this was technically the second time he had sold out of the firm. In the 1990s, Amstrad computers were found to be faulty. “The company suddenly went from profit into loss so we had to do something to regenerate it.”

The rescue involved a complicated arrangement in which the original Amstrad was closed down. Shareholders received a windfall cash payment, shares in Viglen Technology, plus shares in Betacom, a tiny telecoms firm. “We changed the name of Betacom to Amstrad in 1997. And it was this company, which developed into selling set-top boxes, that we sold to Sky last week. So we’ve really sold Amstrad twice.”

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