{"id":713412,"date":"2026-07-27T10:43:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T10:43:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/713412\/"},"modified":"2026-07-27T10:43:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T10:43:08","slug":"businessman-and-philanthropist-sir-ian-wood-dies-aged-84","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/713412\/","title":{"rendered":"Businessman and philanthropist Sir Ian Wood dies aged 84"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Aberdeen-based businessman and philanthropist Sir Ian Wood has died aged 84, his family has announced.<\/p>\n

Sir Ian was one of the UK oil and gas industry’s most respected leaders, who turned his family’s fishing boat repair yard into a global engineering player in the North Sea and internationally.<\/p>\n

He retired as chief executive in 2006 and a year later began concentrating on his charitable work, creating The Wood Foundation, which works on social and economic inequality, especially in Scotland and sub-Saharan Africa<\/p>\n

His family said he died peacefully at home and they would remember his “kindness, generosity, determination and unwavering commitment to his family.”<\/p>\n

Sir Ian was one of Scotland’s wealthiest people<\/a>, with a personal worth estimated at \u00a31.8bn.<\/p>\n

Wood Group started as a family fishing business before Sir Ian took over in 1967.<\/p>\n

Over the next decades, he formed a separate engineering company servicing the rapidly-growing North Sea oil business.<\/p>\n

At its height, the Wood Group was valued at more than \u00a35bn, carrying out work in the energy industry around the world. It went public in 2002 and was sold to a Dubai company<\/a> last year.<\/p>\n

Sir Ian, who retired as chairman of the group in 2012, was knighted in 1994 for services to the oil and gas industry and was later made a member of the Order of the Thistle, Scotland’s highest order of chivalry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Aberdeen-based businessman and philanthropist Sir Ian Wood has died aged 84, his family has announced. Sir Ian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":713413,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-713412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=713412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713412\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/713413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=713412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=713412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=713412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}