COMMUNITY PROFILE

Alan Giles

Senior Independent Director

Foxtons Group plc

Alan is Chairman of The Remuneration Consultants Group, Senior Independent Director and Remuneration Committee Chair of Foxtons plc, and Senior Independent Director of Perpetual Income & Growth Investment Trust plc. He is also an Associate Fellow of Saïd Business School, University of Oxford where he chairs the Advisory Board of the Oxford Institute of Retail Management, and an Honorary Visiting Professor at Cass Business School, City, University of London, where he is Deputy Chair of the Advisory Board of the Mergers & Acquisitions Research Centre.

Alan has extensive retail sector experience, having been Chairman of Fat Face from September 2006 until July 2013. Earlier in his career he formed HMV Group as Chief Executive in 1998 as a leveraged buy-out and led the Group through its London Stock Exchange IPO in 2002 before retiring from the Group in September 2006 to develop a portfolio of non-executive and teaching roles. From 1993 to 1998 he was Managing Director of Waterstone’s, having joined WH Smith Group in 1982 and being appointed to their board in November 1995. He also served as Operations and Development Director for Do It All and General Manager (Books) for WH Smith Retail. Prior to this, he spent seven years in buying and marketing roles with Boots. He was a non-executive director of Rentokil Initial plc from 2006 to 2017, Wilson Bowden plc from 2004 to 2007 and Somerfield plc from 1993 until 2004. He was also a non-executive director of The Competition & Markets Authority until March 2019, having been a non-executive director of the Office of Fair Trading from 2007.

He attended Merton College, University of Oxford, where he graduated in Physics and holds a Masters in Management degree from The Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, California. He was awarded an OBE for services to business and the UK economy in the 2018 New Years Honours list.