A FUND manager working from a small office on a suburban high street yesterday emerged as the UK's best paid man.

Nicholas Roditi earned almost #50m a year from investment decisions made at the north London office of N Roditi & Co, according to a survey in an American magazine.

Financial World magazine's annual survey of the 100 biggest moneymakers on Wall Street ranked Mr Roditi in ninth place.

Mr Roditi, 51, has avoided media publicity and yesterday was away from his office. An assistant said no-one would be making any comment on the survey.

The Financial World survey said Mr Roditi was the only Briton on the list, which was headed by George Soros, the international financier who made hundreds of millions of pounds out of the decision by Britain to withdraw from the European exchange rate mechanism.

His success has been based on the management of the Quantum Quota Fund, controlled by Mr Soros, which has risen in value from #160m at its launch in 1992 to about #1000m last year.

Mr Roditi operates in the small, risk-hungry hedge-fund community, where dealers take out high-risk, high-return, bets in the currency, futures and options markets.

According to an article last year - compiled without Mr Roditi's assistance - the elusive fund manager was born in Zimbabwe and splits his time between Africa and Europe.

He worked first with Schroders, the merchant bank, before moving in 1986 to Jacob Rothschild's investment banking group.

He is listed a director of RIT Capital partners, Mercury World Mining Trust, and J Rothschild.

Entrance to his office, in High Hill House, Hampstead High Street, North-west London, is by an intercom-controlled door.

The only giveaway is a small brass plate carrying a small typed card with the words ``N Roditi and Co''.

It is above a branch of the clothes shop, Gap, with the entrance squeezed between those premises and a Body Shop outlet.

A woman whose answered the intercom said: ``Mr Roditi is not in at the moment. He never talks to the press.''

Florist Christine Howton, 41, a few doors away, said: ``It is stunning to think somebody with that much money would work in an office so small. You would think he would have a plush office in a City complex.

``I've never seen anyone come in here or pass by who looks as though he has that much money.''

Mr Peter Commander, 82, lives next door to Mr Roditi's recently restored eighteenth century parsonage home in Hampstead. His previous home, a listed Georgian house in nearby Hampstead Square, did not have a front garden.

Mr Commander said: ``He told me when he first bought the house next door that he had done so because it had more room for his children.

``A person who would go and pay #1m for that house and then spend nearly a year having it done up obviously wants a nice home for his family.''

He described Mr Roditi as a generous man who last week had offered him some wood to improve his loft.

``He is always a very civil man. He comes over as a normal sort of a chap. You wouldn't know he earns #50m.

``He keeps himself very much to himself and he has got the sense not to go around bragging about his fortune.''