A former small-time Essex businessman is pocketing £25million a year to house migrants – taking home more of Britain’s foreign aid budget than Ghana. Graham King, 56, ran a caravan park, a taxi firm and a teenage disco a quarter of a century ago, but has since won Home Office contracts to provide accommodation for ever-growing numbers of refugees. His company, Clearsprings Ready Homes, holds the exclusive contracts to house asylum seekers across southern England and Wales. Its annual takings from the Home Office, funded from the foreign aid budget, rocketed to an astonishing £500million in 2021. Mr King’s personal share of the pre-tax profits then was well over £25million, meaning he got more of Britain’s international aid than struggling former colony Ghana, which has a population of 32million. Migrants have complained about standards in his hotels, people living nearby have campaigned against their new neighbours, and taxpayers are angered by the rising cost. But asylum tycoon Mr King not only enjoys luxury holidays all over the world but has put his son and daughter through a £44,000-a-year boarding school and bought a listed mansion in rural Essex. Family social media posts reference trips to India, Barbados, Costa Rica, the French Riviera, skiing in the Alps, Berlin, Paris, and Majorca – to name but a selection in the past few years. Accountants working for Mr King’s company predict income will stay booming for years, with the Home Office contract running till 2029 and no sign of migrant numbers dropping. Indeed, last year Home Office spending on housing asylum seekers almost quadrupled, to £3.7billion, meaning Mr King could have made £100million. Today the Daily Mail pictures the migrant tycoon for the first time and tells how he rose to become the asylum hotel King. In the 1990s, he and his brother Jeff were setting out in business on their own after helping their father Jack run his holiday chalets business empire based on Canvey Island in Essex. The King brothers jointly owned the Kings Holiday Camp and Thorney Bay caravan park, plus Steve’s Radio Cars on Canvey Island. In 1999 they made an abortive bid to run an under-18s disco in the Coliseum cinema in Leigh, Essex, before complaints of teenagers vandalising cars, and vomiting in the streets led to Southend council withdrawing its entertainments licence. Then, as the new millennium dawned, the King brothers started winning Government contracts.