From a Leased Petrol Station to a $10 Billion Empire: The Story of Sanjeev and Arani Soosaipillai
In 1999, a young couple set up operations at a single filling station in St Albans, Hertfordshire, armed with a £15,000 bank loan, maxed-out credit cards, and a leasehold arrangement that required no upfront premium. Twenty-five years later, that venture had grown into the Prax Group, an integrated energy company that recorded $10 billion in revenues and employed 1,450 people at its peak. The architects of that transformation were Sanjeev Kumar Soosaipillai and his wife and business partner, Arani Kumar Soosaipillai.
Arriving with Nothing, Building from the Ground Up
Sanjeev Soosaipillai arrived in Britain at 17, having fled Sri Lanka’s civil war. By his second day in the country, he was working in his uncle’s corner shop. To fund his studies at the University of Kent, where he read Accounting and Finance, he ran two parallel ventures: importing shirts from Sri Lanka and sourcing cars from Japan, the latter funded partly through student loans and money borrowed from the woman who would become his wife. His early exposure to fuel retail came through weekend shifts as a cashier at a filling station during his school years.
Arani Soosaipillai had left Sri Lanka at age 12 under similar circumstances. Her father operated petrol stations in the UK, and Sanjeev was frequently left to manage those sites when the family went on holiday. The two met at the University of Kent, and their shared academic background in Accounting and Finance proved foundational to how they would later structure and manage a business spanning crude oil supply, storage, refining, and international distribution.
A £15,000 Loan and a Bank Manager’s Instinct
The couple’s entry into ownership came when a retiring station owner agreed to lease them the Classic Petrol Station in St Albans rather than require an outright purchase. The arrangement eliminated the need for an upfront premium, but working capital remained a problem. They approached an HSBC branch manager and secured £15,000 — the maximum the manager could approve without escalating the request. Sanjeev has since acknowledged that the financial projections he presented were largely improvised. Even that sum fell short; the couple remortgaged their flat and used personal credit lines to cover the shortfall.
As detailed in a profile published by The Boss Magazine, the business was a two-person operation from the start. Sanjeev ran the station full-time, having resigned from his previous job weeks before launch, while Arani continued her own employment and managed the accounts each evening. Their main fuel supplier, Elf Oil UK, extended 10-day credit terms, and because most transactions were card or cash, the business generated positive liquidity almost immediately.
Expansion Backed by Family Assets
State Oil Limited was incorporated in 2000 with a share capital of £2. Additional petrol station sites — in Nutley, Great Yarmouth, Tunbridge Wells, and Golding Barn — followed in 2001. Growth was financed through retained earnings, bank mortgages, and personal loans. A charge was placed over Arani’s parents’ house in 2003. The home of Sanjeev’s close relatives was remortgaged in 2007 to provide further capital. The early corporate office in Weybridge, chosen because it sat geographically between where each founder worked at the time, was so small that a former managing director referred to it as “the broom cupboard.”
A broader overview of Sanjeev Kumar Soosaipillai’s entrepreneurial trajectory reflects how methodically the business moved from petrol retailing into wholesale fuel distribution, then into international cargo trading. Revenues during the retail phase reached £3.8 million. By 2007, the figure was £75.8 million. By 2011, it had reached £420 million.
Trading Independence and Institutional Scale
Full trading autonomy arrived in 2012, when bilateral credit facilities from Société Générale, Natixis, and BCGE allowed Prax to purchase oil cargoes directly without relying on supplier financing structures. Revenues that year stood at £541 million. The company’s profile on Crunchbase documents the scale of the enterprise Sanjeev built as Chairman and Chief Executive, while Arani Soosaipillai’s professional record reflects her role as Chief Human Resources and Corporate Officer, the executive responsible for holding the organisation together through rapid international expansion.
By the company’s 25th anniversary in September 2024, Prax held gross assets of $2.3 billion and net assets of $604 million. Arani’s professional contributions to that outcome were described by her husband in unambiguous terms: “She provided the support and strength which has enabled me to be so dedicated to the business. If you imagine some of the huge risks we took, she was always 100% behind me.”
A Model Built on Calculated Risk
What the Soosaipillai story demonstrates is not simply entrepreneurial ambition but a consistent willingness to place personal assets — and those of immediate family — behind every stage of growth. That tolerance for personal liability, combined with disciplined cash management and a preference for partnership structures during the early trading years, converted a leased Hertfordshire filling station into one of Britain’s largest independent energy businesses. The £15,000 loan that started it all was approved, Sanjeev has said, by a bank manager whose instinct apparently outpaced the projections he was handed.