Close Brothers Adds Two To Board

Wendy Spires

3 August 2012

Close Brothers has appointed Shonaid Jemmett-Page as an independent non-executive director of the UK-listed group and Elizabeth Lee as an executive director.

Jemmett-Page, a veteran of Unilever, was most recently chief operating officer of CDC Group. She is currently a non-executive director of GKN and APR Energy and has previously served as a non-executive director of Havelock Europa.

Lee, who was also named group head of legal and regulatory affairs, joined Close Brothers as general counsel and company secretary in 2009, having previously been general counsel for Europe at Lehman Brothers. She also held various roles within General Electric’s financial services businesses.

Close Brothers Group continued to deliver strong growth in its banking division although difficult trading conditions for its Winterflood broking arm affected performance, the firm reported last month.

The firm issued a pre-close trading update ahead of its 2012 financial year-end, giving comments on performance for the five months to 30 June. It issues full-year results on the 12 months to 31 July on 25 September this year.

The banking division’s loan book increased by 10 per cent to £4.1 billion at 30 June 2012 and is up 20 per cent for the financial year to date.

The securities division continued to experience difficult market conditions and Winterflood has been affected by low retail investor risk appetite throughout the period.

The asset management division is nearing completion of its restructuring and made a small loss as expected. Private clients assets under management remained unchanged at £6.9 billion at 30 June 2012 as positive net new funds were offset by negative market movements.

Total AuM fell to £8.2 billion reflecting the previously announced sale of OLIM's property fund management business with £0.4 billion in AuM.