Sanjeev Kumar Soosaipillai is a British-Sri Lankan entrepreneur who co-founded Prax Group in 1999 alongside his wife, Arani Kumar Soosaipillai. He served as the company’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, leading its growth from a single petrol station into a multinational energy conglomerate headquartered in the United Kingdom with revenues of $10 billion and approximately 1,450 employees. Under his leadership, Prax expanded into refining, trading, storage, distribution, retail and aviation fuel supply across Europe, the Americas, Asia and Southern Africa.
Early life and Arrival in the UK
Soosaipillai grew up in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He arrived in England at the age of 17, having left the country during its civil war. He has recalled that within a day of arriving, he began working at a corner shop owned by his uncle.
“From the second day that I arrived in the UK, I started working,” he said. “From that day until today, I’ve just carried on working and here I am. And I’m still going!”
Before entering the oil industry, Soosaipillai showed an early appetite for commerce. While still a child in Colombo, he organised a ticketed fair in his back garden, an event he has described as his first taste of running a business.
Education and Early Career
Soosaipillai enrolled at the University of Kent, where he earned a BA (Hons) in Accounting and Finance with Computing, graduating in 1997. He has said that university was motivated more by respect for his parents’ emphasis on education than by personal preference; he would have chosen to start a business sooner.
To fund himself as a student, he imported and sold shirts from Sri Lanka and cars from Japan. “That was a risky venture,” he said. “I ended up taking a student loan out for that. Actually, I also had to ask Arani to take a loan out and give me some of her money as well!”
He also worked part-time as a cashier at a filling station, which gave him a working knowledge of petrol retailing. It was at the University of Kent that he met Arani, who had also left Sri Lanka with her family.
After graduating, Soosaipillai joined Air Products & Chemicals Plc as a project analyst between 1997 and 1999, where he supported capital project planning, financial analysis and risk assessment, reporting to the European Board of Directors. During the same period he pursued Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) qualifications, reaching finalist level.
Founding Prax Group
Sanjeev and Arani launched their business in 1999. Their entry into oil retailing came through a connection who was nearing retirement and willing to lease them a filling station, even though the couple could not afford to buy it outright. They secured a £15,000 loan (the maximum a branch bank manager could authorise at the time) and raised additional funds using credit cards and remortgaging their flat.
“We needed a lot of money to kick it off, and we went to Kingdom Come to do it,” Soosaipillai said. “We put everything we had into starting the business.”
The business initially traded through State Oil Limited (SOL) and later Prax Petroleum Limited. The couple’s early commercial model centred on buying fuel from suppliers’ oil storage terminals, then selling it on an ex-terminal or delivered basis, earning margins by pairing differing supplier and customer pricing structures, month-average versus week-average versus spot pricing, with some hedging through derivative instruments.
Weybridge, Surrey, became the company’s base for straightforward reasons of geography.
“Why Weybridge? Because it was between where I worked at the time, and where Arani worked at the time,” Soosaipillai explained. “We’d never been there before, but we looked on the map and that seemed to be kind of middle-ish.”
Their first office was a serviced space with four desks, referred to by one colleague as “the broom cupboard.”
Building Prax Group
Over the next two decades, Soosaipillai led the company through a succession of expansions. Prax moved from petrol retailing into wholesale fuel distribution in 2002, establishing relationships with distributors including Texaco Team Flitwick, Bayfords, Shell Direct, Total Butler, Power, Mabanaft, Barton Petroleum and Harvest Energy.
The company entered independent international trading around 2012, after securing bilateral bank lines from Société Générale, Natixis and BCGE, which gave it the capacity to buy and import cargoes without relying on supplier financing. Revenue during that period reached £541 million and net equity £9.9 million.
Prax Group went on to acquire Lindsey Oil Refinery on the Humber, now Prax Lindsey Oil Refinery, which gave the company access to the 215-kilometre Finaline pipeline running to Buncefield, and from there to Heathrow Airport. The company also acquired OIL! Tankstellen, a German-based retail fuel brand with operations across four European countries. In late 2024, Prax acquired a 36.36% interest in Natref, South Africa’s only inland crude oil refinery, from TotalEnergies, along with a terminal, commercial and retail network in Botswana. At its peak, the company employed more than 1,400 staff, with offices worldwide and revenues exceeding $10 billion.
Prax Group Under Soosaipillai’s Leadership
By the time of his tenure, Prax Group operated across the full oil value chain, upstream, midstream and downstream, with trading desks handling crude, refined products and biofuels on global markets. The company’s UK consumer brands included Harvest Energy for retail fuel and Axis Logistics for distribution; its aviation division supplied fuel to airports including London City, Manchester, Leeds Bradford and London Stansted, and to airlines including Ryanair, Lufthansa and KLM. Prax also entered biofuels trading and HVO production, and joined two CCUS (carbon capture, utilisation and storage) clusters in the Humber region.
Soosaipillai was outspoken on UK energy taxation. He argued that domestic carbon and levy taxes put UK refineries at a disadvantage to overseas competitors.
“Because our facility is based in the UK, we have to pay all sorts of tax, carbon tax, levy tax, this tax, that tax, so our diesel is much more expensive,” he told the company magazine. “But if we import that same litre of diesel from India, those refineries have none of that. So how are we, as a UK manufacturing business, able to compete?”
What Can Other Entrepreneurs Learn From Sanjeev Soosaipillai?
Reflecting on the factors behind his career, Soosaipillai pointed to three lessons in particular: the need to adapt when markets, technology or circumstances shift; the value of collaboration over individual effort; and the habit of directing attention toward solutions rather than dwelling on setbacks. Those principles tracked closely with the biographical record,a teenager who arrived in England during a civil war and began working the next day, a student who funded himself through improvised import businesses, and a founder who staked everything on a leased filling station before building a company with revenues measured in the billions. His parents, he said, instilled three things in him from an early age: religion, education and love. A willingness to take calculated risks, and a partner in Arani who shared that willingness, supplied the rest.
