Virgin Company Profile

Founded and owned by serial chancer Richard Branson, the Virgin brand has been attached to a diverse array of business with different degrees of success since the 1970s, including planes, wines, cola, records, gyms, phones and banks. Virgin has also found profit opportunities in railway and NHS privatisation, through its Virgin Trains and Virgin Care businesses respectively.

You can find Corporate Watch articles on Virgin in the right hand column of this page, or by clicking here.

There is lots of useful information on the Virgin Group website:

Click here for Virgin’s head office and basic contact details.

Click here to find out which business Virgin is currently involved in.

Click here to find out who the directors of the Virgin group are (to find out who the directors of each of the individual Virgin businesses are, you’ll need to go to the relevant website).

Virgin’s financial affairs are notoriously opaque, with Branson and family ultimately owning the Virgin group from the British Virgin Islands. The best window into the overall financial performance of the companies owned by Virgin is the Virgin UK Holdings Ltd accounts. Click here to download them from Companies House.

For the financial performance of each Virgin business, you’ll need to get the relevant company’s accounts from Companies House.

Note that not all Virgin-branded companies are owned by Branson and the Virgin group. Virgin Media is majority owned by US media giant Liberty Global, for example, which pays Virgin for use of the brand.

For a more critical perspective on Virgin and Branson, try the book Branson: Behind the Mask, by Tom Bower, or at least click here for a good review of it.