Parts master

From refugee to automotive parts kingpin - Sukhpal's life story sounds like a plot for a Hollywood feature film

- GREG POTTS

When Sukhpal Singh Ahluwalia was just 13 years old, Ugandan despot Idi Amin claimed that he had been instructed by God to expel the circa 80,000 Ugandan Asians from their country.

They had 90 days to leave.

As a child, Sukhpal had developed a love of cars by accompanying his father in a MkI Ford Cortina to the three Total petrol stations that the family owned in Jinja, a city 50 miles east of the Ugandan capital Kampala. Now, they arrived at RAF Greenham Common as refugees with nothing.

A year later and they were finally resettled into social housing in London.

"Can you imagine the cars that I saw in London at that time? That was the first thing that struck me," he recalls. "There were Jaguar XJ6s and E-types, big Mercedes saloons. Everything was here. It was just like a dream."

Sukhpal spent his teenage years grafting. Paper rounds in the mornings, shop work in the afternoons and evenings. Then, on weekends he would be working at Portobello market on a Saturday and Petticoat Lane on a Sunday.

"The markets introduced me to the idea of commerce, buying and selling, customer relations et cetera, but menial tasks didn't bother me at all. Cleaning toilets or whatever, I'd do it to make some money."