Exposing the need for improved corporate and financial product transparency has been at the core of Philip’s campaigning activities which has grown out of his experience as chairman and investment trustee of his family trading company’s SASS. He came to prominence gaining wide media coverage during the 2012 Shareholder Spring through critical AGM comments on excessive boardroom pay.
He demonstrated that company AGM’s could be – and should and indeed have been – converted, where appropriate, into robust challenges from ordinary retail shareholders – the more so when institutional shareholders generally prefer to stay away from such meetings.
He applied the same relentless approach in pursuing and tackling Andrew Bailey at the FSA (then FCA) with particular reference to the way in which the regulator had found itself hamstrung by its application of the so-called principles of Maxwellisation (a concept which quaintly happens to immortalise one of Britain’s biggest corporate crooks) which seriously delayed publication of the FCA’s report into the collapse of HBoS. The FCA ‘s separate report, instructed by the Treasury Select Committee, into the suitability of the former HBoS directors to serve as company directors was eventually published, jointly by the PRA and FCA, in August 2022. The conclusion was not to pursue the investigation. No reasons were given for the decision. Given the amount of available evidence and the conclusion of other investigations it is unthinkable that the PRA/FCA August 2022 will not be challenged.
He is an Ambassador for the Transparency Task Force – a world-wide think tank and forum of financial commentators, academics, financial professionals, politicians – dedicated to improving transparency in financial services. He graduated from the University of Nottingham with a degree in Industrial Economics.
