Speakers
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Mike Bishop Mike Bishop has been involved in investment management for over 40 years since leaving Oxford University in 1971 with an honours degree in Engineering Science. After running an in-house pension fund for a listed company he managed funds at Kleinwort Benson Investment Management before joining Gartmore in 1984. He became a Director of the Pension Fund Management subsidiary later that year and joined the main Board in 1989. As well as managing equities, he later chaired the Pension Fund Asset Allocation Committee and drove Gartmore’s corporate governance development including involvement in several significant activist cases in the early 1990s. In 1998 he joined Norwich Union Investment Management, later Morley Fund Management, serving on both Boards. He retired in 2004. He has been an adviser to RWC‘s activist funds since 2005, initially to the UK funds and to the European Fund from 2009, and chairs both investment committeees. He is a past director of Gartmore plc, on its listing in 1995, and of a quoted Investment Trust and is currently a non-executive director of Liontrust Asset Management plc. -
Julian Franks Julian Franks is a Professor of Finance and Academic Director of the Centre of Corporate Governance at the London Business School. Julian is widely published, in which his research focuses on bankruptcy and financial distress, corporate ownership and control, cost of capital and regulation. His work on ownership and control (with Colin Mayer and Stefano Rossi) has won two international prizes. Two of his published papers have been awarded prizes for the ‘best paper’ of the year. He is Associate Editor of five finance journals. He served as a member of the DTI-Treasury committee for reviewing the UK’s insolvency code in 2001 and was a member of one of The Company Law Review’s committees on corporate governance. He has been an advisor to Ofcom and its predecessor Oftel for more than 15 years. He also advises other UK regulatory authorities including the ORR and Ofwat. He has been an expert witness for the UK government at The World Court at The Hague on an inter-governmental dispute on the matter of landing rights at Heathrow and more recently for Ofcom in three appeals to the Competition Appeals Tribunal. He advised (with Professor Brealey) The Office of Constitutional Affairs on the issue of outside equity for law firms and provided advice to a Treasury committee chaired by Paul Myners on a review of the governance of mutuals. Recently, he was a member of a government taskforce (the Breedon Committee) investigating new avenues of non bank sources of finance for small to medium sized companies. He is a non-executive director of OXERA and is on the international advisory boards of Stern Stewart. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of California at both Berkeley and Los Angeles.
