Tycoon celebrates dual citizenship with ?20m arts donation

A shower of gold has fallen on the Royal Opera in Covent Garden and the Wales Millennium Centre.

Over the next five years, they will get £10m each to create new productions, in one of the largest private gifts ever to the performing arts.

Donald Gordon, a South African businessman living in London, who heads the shopping centres giant Liberty International, said the donations, and a string of other grants in South Africa, were to celebrate his becoming a dual citizen.

The windfall may help the infant Millennium Centre escape the curse of the lottery, where giant new arts institutions and museums raise their capital and open in a blaze of publicity, only to totter under the weight of running costs.

The last of the big millennium lottery-funded projects, the centre is due to open next November, providing a new home for Welsh National Opera and a range of other local and touring companies. It is now nearing completion in Cardiff's dockland and is modestly described by its board as "the most exciting cultural initiative happening in Europe today".

The gift comes with strings: as well as cooperating with one another, both will be expected to work with opera and ballet companies in South Africa, which Mr Gordon said had been starved of resources for decades.

Millennium Centre chairman, Sir David Rowe-Beddoe, a friend of Donald Gordon, called his gift "an outstanding example of cultural philanthropy", adding that both men hoped it would stimulate further support from individuals and businesses.

At Covent Garden, chief executive Tony Hall was exultant. "I am thrilled to be able to announce this generous gift. Thrilled because not only does this provide us with vital funds to put towards staging new productions of operas and ballets, the lifeblood of the Royal Opera House, but it also forges exciting links with the new Wales Millennium Centre, and further develops our relationship with South Africa."

Mr Gordon himself cheerfully described the gift as a retirement hobby. He retires next year as head of Liberty, which owns some of the biggest shopping centres in the UK, including the Metro in Gateshead and the Lakeside in Thurrock .

The arts donations, he said, "will launch me into a fascinating activity which could be an important focus of my life in retirement."

He also admitted his aim is to cheat the tax man.

"My objective is to use my investment base to its maximum economic potential during the course of the rest of my life rather than the much diminished amount which would be left after payment of estate duties and other taxes, following my demise."