Paul Reichmann - Telegraph But transport would clearly be a key to success for a new financial district four miles east of the Bank of England. It was claimed that Margaret Thatcher had personally promised Reichmann that the Jubilee Line would reach Canary Wharf - but it did not do so until 1999. The ramshackle Docklands Light Railway was a poor substitute, and the journey time by road was a crucial disadvantage in the pitch for prestigious tenants who could bring cash flow to service the project's ballooning debt. With the development half empty, Reichmann resorted to undercutting rents to fill space - attracting, among others, the Telegraph and Mirror groups into One Canada Square. But in 1992 the lenders lost faith, and Olympia & York was forced into bankruptcy with $20 billion of debts. Having ranked as the seventh richest family in the world, the Reichmanns were reputedly down to their last $100 million. Unbowed, the brothers returned to the fray three years later, as minority partners in a consortium that included Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia and the billionaire investor George Soros, to buy Canary Wharf back from the administrator and drive the project to completion. Their new company, Canary Wharf Group, was successfully floated on the Stock Exchange in 1999; banks such as Barclays, HSBC and the ill-fated Lehman Brothers became major tenants; luxury brands filled the underground malls; and the working population of Canary Wharf surpassed 60,000 by the time the company was taken over by Songbird Estates in 2004. Tall, dark-suited, serious and soft-spoken, Paul Reichmann shunned personal publicity. Asked what drove his gambler's appetite for billion-dollar risk, he answered: "We never do anything for the sake of being bigger, or of wanting more control... There is a sense of challenge, the challenge in doing something meaningful. In the end, though, it is an addiction. Canary Wharf transformed the skyline of London's Docklands (ALAMY) Paul Reichmann was born on September 27 1930 in Vienna, the fifth of six children of parents who had migrated from their native rural Hungary. His father, Samuel, made a good living distributing eggs, but after the Anschluss in 1938 the family fled, first to Paris and then to Tangier - where Samuel prospered again as a currency dealer. Many of their relatives perished in German concentration camps. From 1949 Paul devoted himself to Talmudic studies in Britain and Israel. In 1953 he returned to Morocco to work in Casablanca as a shopkeeper and as a volunteer for Ozar Hatorah, an Orthodox Jewish educational charity - later describing his contribution there as "a greater achievement" than his real estate career. In 1956 he followed his family to Canada, where three of his brothers - Edward, Louis and Ralph - had established the Olympia Floor & Wall Tile Co, and the eldest, Albert, had launched York Factory Developments. Their interests were in due course consolidated as Olympia & York, with Paul, Albert and Ralph focused on real estate while Edward and Louis continued to run the tile importing business. Albert was chairman in deference to his seniority, but Paul was always the driving force and dealmaker. In Toronto, from modest beginnings they went on to build Canada's tallest building, First Canadian Place, in 1973, and to transform the city's run-down waterfront. In New York they invested on a bold scale at a time when the city itself was almost broke, developing the World Financial Center - four towers on reclaimed land at the southern tip of Manhattan - and acquiring twice as much office space as the Rockefeller family. They also invested in natural resources, buying the Gulf Canada oil business from Chevron in 1986 for $2.8 billion, and in projects in Israel. In retirement, Reichmann continued to play the real estate market - and took a hit in the 2008 financial crisis, when his remaining shareholding in Canary Wharf was repossessed by a German bank. But the family fortune was still estimated at $2 billion. Paul Reichmann was a devout Jew who closed his offices and construction sites on the Sabbath and was said to have once walked home from Toronto airport because he could not travel by car after sunset on a Friday. He collected rare Hebrew texts, and the family gave some $50 million a year to Jewish causes. He married, in 1953, Lea Feldman, with whom he had two sons and three daughters. Paul Reichmann, born September 27 1930, died October 25 2013