John Plender (USA)

John Plender has been a senior editorial writer and columnist at the Financial Times since 1981, an assignment he combined until recently with current affairs broadcasting for the BBC and Channel Four. He has a weekly column on economics and business on Mondays and also writes for the opinion pages.

John Plender was the winner of the Wincott Foundation senior prize for excellence in financial journalism in 1994. His books include That’s The Way The Money Goes (Andre Deutsch, 1982), The Square Mile, with Paul Wallace, (Hutchinson, 1984), A Stake In The Future (Nicholas Brealey, 1997) and Going Off The Rails - Global Capital And The Crisis Of Legitimacy (John Wiley, 2003)

From LinkedIn: 

After taking his degree at Oxford University, John Plender joined Deloitte, Plender, Griffiths & Co in the City of London in 1967, qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1970. He then moved into journalism and became financial editor of The Economist in 1974, where he remained until joining the British Foreign Office policy planning staff in 1980. On leaving the Foreign Office, John Plender became a senior editorial writer and columnist at the Financial Times, an assignment that he combined for a time with current affairs broadcasting for the BBC and Channel 4. 

In the 1980s he was a member of the London Stock Exchange’s quality of markets advisory committee. In the 1990s he chaired Pensions and Investment Research Consultants (PIRC), a leading corporate governance consultancy. In 2003 he became a non-executive director of Quintain PLC, a FTSE 350 company, which he chaired from 2007 to 2009. 

Plender served on the UK Company Law Review steering group, which provided the blueprint for the UK’s 2006 Companies Act and is a member of the pro bono Private Sector Advisory Group set up by the OECD and the World Bank to help improve corporate governance in the developing world. He is currently a trustee of the £2.7bn Pearson Group Pension Fund and chairs the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, a monetary think tank and advisory group. 

John Plender has lectured for, among others, the Yale School of Business Management, the National Association for Business Economics, the London School of Economics, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, London Business School, The National Association of Pension Funds, Bocconi University, Milan and the International Corporate Governance Network. In 1994 he won the senior Wincott Award for Excellence in Financial Journalism. 

Recent books include Going Off The Rails - Global Capital And The Crisis Of Legitimacy, published by John Wiley in 2003, which anticipated the financial crisis.