Indian steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal and his family retained their top spot as Britain’s richest for the seventh year in succession while the combined worth of the country’s 1000 wealthiest individuals defied double-dip recession to reach record levels during the last year. Mittal, 61, and his family’s worth came down by £4,814 million, but they were still the richest in Britain with a net worth of £12.7 billion, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, which annually releases the worth of Britain’s wealthiest individuals. Mittal is marginally ahead with the Russian iron ore magnate, Alisher Usmanov, who takes the second place with an estimated worth of £12.3 billion. Indin-origin industrialist brothers, Sri and Gopichand Hinduja were the fourth richest in the list with a net worth of 8.6 billion pounds, ‘The Sunday Times’ said in an advance release yesterday. The newspaper’s research reveals that the rich got richer over the last year, despite a global recession ñ the combinedworth of the country’s 1,000 wealthiest people was 414 billion pounds, which is an increase from last year of 4.7 per cent.