Rudd joins Gartmore board

NIGEL RUDD, chairman of the Yale locks and Rawlplugs group, Williams Holdings, is joining the board of Gartmore as part of the fund manager's preparations for a stock market listing.

Mr Rudd is one of four independent non-executive directors recruited to enable Gartmore to meet the Cadbury code on corporate governance. The others are Victor Benjamin, deputy chairman of Tesco, Simon Duffy, finance director of Thorn-EMI, and James Watson, chairman of NFC.

Mr Rudd will be the senior non- executive, Mr Duffy will chair the audit and compliance committee and Mr Benjamin the remuneration committee, which will set salary levels for senior executives. Mr Benjamin is also on the remuneration committee at Tesco, which has paid its chairman about pounds 1m in each of the past two years and nearly pounds 1.5m the year before that.

Gartmore will have four other non-executives on its board, but they would not be regarded as independent as they will represent Banque Indosuez, the firm's parent. Indosuez will retain a controlling stake of nearly 75 per cent after the flotation, which is expected early next month.

With eight executive directors headed by Paul Myners, chairman, Gartmore will have a large board for a company whose market value seems likely to be less than pounds 300m. Sophie Hull, its spokeswoman, said other investment managers, such as Mercury Asset Management, had similar-sized boards.

Gartmore has had tremendous success in recent years, increasing its funds under management from pounds 7bn to pounds 18bn since the end of 1990.

The firm's investment performance has been consistently good. It had an exceptionally good year last year and topped the Independent's performance league table of pension fund managers.

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