City veteran du Plessis steps down as BT chair

JAN du Plessis is stepping back from his stellar City career after 17 years on FTSE100 boards, quitting his job as BT chairman and creating a vacancy for one of the most prestigious jobs in the Square Mile.

Du Plessis, who has also chaired British American Tobacco, Rio Tinto and SAB Miller and been on the boards of Marks & Spencer and Lloyds, will hand over the reins at BT by the end of the year.

Now 67, the Afrikaner was finance director at Rothmans before it was taken over by BAT in 1998. He went on to chair

BAT at the age of just 49 — an extremely young age to chair a FTSE company.

He chaired the mining giant Rio Tinto from 2009 to 2018 and became BT chairman in 2017, hiring Worldpay tech tycoon Philip Jansen as chief executive at a time when the stock market had become disillusioned with the group’s strategy under Gavin Patterson.

BT’s senior non-executive director Iain Conn, former chief executive of Centrica, is in charge of finding a replacement and has launched a search for outside and internal candidates.

Analysts said non-executive director Sir Ian Cheshire, the former Kingfisher CEO, was a hot favourite for the role among internal candidates. He announced in December he was stepping down as a non-executive director at Barclays’ retail bank.

Being chairman of BT is pretty much a full-time job, and du Plessis is keen to spend more time on his other activities which include some charity involvement.