Legal & General (L&G), the FTSE-100 insurance and asset management group, is preparing to kick off a search for a successor to chairman Sir John Kingman.
Sky News has learnt that the company, which this week announced a major corporate deal in the US, is close to appointing headhunters to oversee the appointment process.
City sources said this weekend that Sir John was likely to step down from the L&G board and retire as chairman at its annual meeting next year.
That timetable will give the company, which will mark its bicentenary in just over a decade, about 15 months to identify and appoint its next chair.
It was unclear on Saturday whether any of L&G’s existing non-executive directors would be in contention for the role.
Sir John has become one of the City’s most prominent figures over the last decade, having been a surprise appointment in 2016 to replace interim chair Rudy Markham.
Since then, he has become chairman of Barclays’ UK ring-fenced bank subsidiary, which replaced an earlier role he held as chairman of Tesco Bank.
He also presided over a landmark review of audit regulation in the UK in the aftermath of accounting scandals at companies such as BHS and Carillion.
Prior to his career in business, Sir John was a long-serving Whitehall mandarin, playing a leading role to Britain’s response to the 2008 financial crisis.
Following the bailouts of Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland – now NatWest Group – he was named the first chief executive of UK Financial Investments, the agency set up to manage the taxpayer’s bank stakes.
While in that role, he oversaw the effective defenestration of Sir Victor Blank as Lloyds’ chair – a move which stunned the City.
Following that, he moved to Rothschild as an investment banker.
For most of Sir John’s tenure as L&G chair, the company was run by Sir Nigel Wilson, who oversaw a big push by the company into financing urban regeneration projects across the UK, and expanding its pension risk…
