Bias claim as new chairman of BBC is set to be named
JP Morgan staff set for big bonuses
THE BBC’s new chairman is likely to be appointed by Prime Minister Theresa May within days amid concerns that the selection panel is leaning towards candidates who lack relevant business experience.
The new board is due to be up and running by April and will replace the BBC’s executive board and the corporation’s present regulator, the BBC Trust, whose chairman Rona Fairhead said she would not be taking up the £100,000 role after May said she would have to apply for it.
BBC regulation in future will be handled by commercial media and telecoms regulator Ofcom.
The new so-called unitary board has a broad brief of ensuring the BBC’s ‘strategy, activity and output are in the public interest’, and is the creation of former Culture Secretary John Whittingdale.
Those close to the process said Dame Colette Bowe, chairman of the Banking Standards Board, is the dominant figure on the panel.
A person close to the selection process said: ‘Colette Bowe is a 70year-old professional regulator, a former chairman of media and tel- ecoms regulator Ofcom, and she is determined that the successful candidate will have a regulatory background first rather than a media background – and that it will be a woman not a man.
‘That is different to the original brief for the post from the Department for Culture Media & Sport [DCMS], which was looking for someone with a business background who could help develop the BBC as the country’s biggest media business and one of the world’s biggest media brands – and lead it into a post-licence fee world.’
The BBC licence fee is guaranteed until 2028 but long before that the corporation will have to explore new ways of financing itself.
One of the two candidates understood to be leading the field is Dame Deirdre Hutton, chairwoman of the Civil Aviation Authority.
She is former chairwoman of the Food Standards Agency, as well as former deputy chairwoman of the Financial Services Authority. The other favoured candidate is Sir David Clementi, former deputy governor of the Bank of England and former chairman of Prudential.
There are thought to be a number of other candidates still in the running. They include John Makinson, chairman of publisher Penguin Random House; the author and former journalist William Shawcross, who is chairman of the Charities Commission; Roger Parry, the former broadcast journalist who has run numerous media businesses; Sir David Arculus, the former Emap publishing boss who chairs industry trade association Energy UK; and Dame Liz Forgan, head of the Arts Council.
The chairmanship is a part-time role, but it is understood that the successful candidate will be expected to work full-time in the post for an initial period.
Bowe will make the appointment with three others: Lord Janvrin, former Private Secretary to the Queen; Sue Owen, permanent secretary at DCMS, and chairman Sir Peter Spencer, a former Controller of the Navy. JP MORGAN will this week announce a hike in profits that could herald bumper bonuses for the bank’s 16,000 UK staff.
The bank, the largest in the world by market capitalisation, is set to announce its pre-tax profits rose to $37.4billion (£30.4billion) – 8 per cent higher than the previous year, according to estimates from Barclays. The bank is reporting full-year numbers on Friday.
The bank’s investment bankers are paid an average of £162,000 each in salary and bonuses. The US bank has a big presence in London as well as a huge global technology and operations centre in Bournemouth.
Experts expect the US investment banks to increase bonuses this year after a strong year. European banks are reducing bonus pools in the wake of weak performance and public pressure on pay.
Chief executive Jamie Dimon is also likely to be pressed on whether he will move staff out of the UK following Brexit.
In an interview last week, he said that pre-referendum warnings of around 4,000 jobs moving were a worst case scenario and that he wished he would not have to move any staff out of London.
He told Financial News: ‘My goal is that whatever it is, I want to be able to serve clients the next day. So we just want to make sure we’re prepared to serve the client the next day. And then we’ll simply have to follow the new laws. I wish we could keep it all here.’