David Abrahams has amassed his personal wealth just as quietly as he likes to give it away, causing many observers to question where the money has come from, write Jon Ungoed-Thomas and Jonathan Calvert.

It certainly was not inherited. His father, Bennie, left him £275,000 in his will, a not insubstantial amount in 1991 but not enough to sustain his son’s recent largesse.

Abrahams, who left school at 16, is said to have started with a clothes stall at a local market and by renting out £50-a-week flats on Tyneside.

By the mid-1990s, according to newspaper reports at the time, he had developed a portfolio of up to 200 properties. The income appears to have gone through his personal rather than company accounts.

The scale of Abrahams’s dealings were revealed in a legal dispute with one of his business partners, Alan Gold, a dentist, over who was responsible for paying back mortgage debts on properties they had jointly acquired. Court documents reveal that the two men were offered loans totalling £1.7m on 46 properties, including 28 solely owned by Abrahams.

Business associates say that Abrahams was in danger of going bust in the property slump in the early 1990s. But the boom of recent years means that his holdings are likely to be worth millions. He is also single and has no dependants.

Quite how much he is worth is extremely hard to fathom. Abrahams’s network of companies — which includes Acorn Commercial Developments (Northumbria) and Park View Property Investments – shows net assets worth less than £200,000.

There are, however, significant borrowings, with Acorn Residential Estates (Durham) securing £7.5m bank loans on properties worth £6.4m.

One of his projects is a proposed £60m business park next to the A1(M) in Co Durham. He is also reported to be seeking to build 12 terraced houses and nine flats in Haswell, a village just outside Tony Blair’s Sedgefield constituency.

Among Abrahams’s other property interests are a row of 13 shops in Whitley Bay, north Tyneside. Tenants said last week they were not happy with his record as a landlord, amid suggestions that he wanted to knock down the parade to build bigger shops. One said:

“I was paying £4,000 a year and he wanted £7,000. I felt like he was trying to force me out.

“I had to get a surveyor in to fight my case. In the end I was stuck with a £700-a-year rent hike — which I don’t think [Abrahams] was very happy about.”

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