Simon Goodley
6 min read
Peter Waddell at his historic home near Bromley, south London. </span><span>Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian</span>" height="768" loading="eager" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==" width="960">
In many ways, Peter Waddell is lucky to be alive, let alone a multimillionaire. His backstory involves him wandering the streets of Glasgow after parental abuse left him in a children’s home during the 1970s.
And yet Waddell went on to build a used car empire called Big Motoring World, accumulating an estimated £500m fortune, a historic home on the outskirts of London and a string of performance cars.
But now the 59-year-old faces another challenging chapter, which is threatening chunks of his fortune. The used car salesman has brought an employment tribunal claim as well as a high court case against private equity investors in his company after he was ousted from Big last year.
His exit, in April 2024, was triggered after an investigation found he had made sexist, racist and abusive comments towards colleagues – allegations that he contests.
However, Waddell goes further than simply denying the claims, raising questions about how private equity firms interact with founders once the financiers have invested in their companies.
His court filings allege he was prevented from responding to the accusations, and that they were used by his “capricious” investors who “prejudged and in fact determined the outcome of [an] independent investigation as a means of securing Peter Waddell’s exclusion from Big”.
Now it looks likely that a court will have to assess whether Waddell’s alleged behaviour demanded he be sidelined from the business he created. A surprising second question will also be in play: does Waddell’s ousting make him a victim?
When entrepreneurs give interviews about their big career break, they often tell tales about dropping out of university to launch a startup or hustling for jobs they were barely qualified for. Waddell’s tale is very different.
The businessman, who is autistic, has dyslexia and is partially deaf, for which he now wears two hearing aids, has a story that involves being physically abused by his mother.
“She scarred my whole body, attempted to cut my hands off and smashed my head,” he said in a recent interview. From toddler age onwards he spent most of his childhood in a children’s home. From there he graduated to living on the streets, describing himself as a “tramp”.
Homeless and desperate for warmth during one particularly biting winter day, Waddell wound up at Glasgow’s Buchanan bus station where he shielded himself from the cold behind a pile of suitcases in the boot of a parked coach. The door was slammed behind him and the teenager finally emerged in London.
In the capital he recalls landing a job at a minicab office and eventually ploughing his earnings into buying cars at auction, which he lined up in parking spaces along the road near a flat he had managed to rent. This was the genesis of Big Motoring World, which grew to a company with 525 employees, revenues of £371m and profits of £6.6m, according to the company’s 2021 annual accounts.
