Businessman and philanthropist Sir Ian Wood dies aged 84

Aberdeen-based businessman and philanthropist Sir Ian Wood has died aged 84, his family have announced.

Sir Ian was one of the UK oil and gas industry’s most respected leaders and transformed his family’s fishing boat repair shop into a global engineering player in the North Sea and internationally.

He retired as chief executive in 2006 and a year later began to concentrate on charity work, founding The Wood Foundation, which works on social and economic inequality, particularly in Scotland and sub-Saharan Africa.

His family said he died peacefully at home and that they would remember his “kindness, generosity, determination and unwavering devotion to his family”.

Sir Ian was one of Scotland’s richest people, with his personal fortune estimated at £1.8 billion.

Wood Group began as a family fishing business before Sir Ian took it over in 1967.

In the following years he established a separate engineering company serving the rapidly growing North Sea oil business.

The value of Wood Group, which operates in the energy sector all over the world, was over £5 billion. It went public in 2002 and was sold to a company in Dubai last year.

Sir Ian, who retired as chairman of the group in 2012, was knighted in 1994 for his services to the oil and gas industry and later became a member of the Order of the Thistle, Scotland’s highest order of chivalry.