From UK National Adviser, By Helen Burggraf

Jon Moulton, one of the UK’s best-known and most outspoken venture capitalists, has been named chairman of Guernsey’s Channel Islands Stock Exchange (CISX).

Moulton, a Guernsey resident, takes over from Graham Hall, a lawyer, who has been interim chairman of the exchange.

Moulton is perhaps best known for having founded the private equity firm Better Capital, where he remains chairman, in 2009, after leaving another PE firm, Alchemy Partners. He is also a non-executive chairman of FinnCap, the stockbroker, and chairman of Aurigny Group, Guernsey’s struggling airline.

A chartered accountant, corporate finance expert and fellow of the Institute for Turnaround Professionals, Moulton is known for being outspoken, and for his willingness to take on troubled companies, with the aim of turning them around. The strategy has evidently paid off, as he was tied for 465th place on the Times’s Rich List earlier this year, with wealth of around £27m, up from tied for 529th place last year.

Tamara Menteshvili, chief executive of CISX, said Moulton’s appointment was expected to “add to the high level of expertise” already in place on the CISX board.

5,000 listings

Earlier this month, the Channel Islands Stock Exchange announced that it had reached the “milestone” of 5,000 listings. Last year, some 510 companies listed on the exchange, compared with 498 the previous year.

The exchange was founded in 1998, making this its 15th year in operation.

For more on this story go to:

http://www.international-adviser.com/news/uk/jon-moulton-named-cisx-chairman

Related story about Jon Moulton from The Guardian UK – “Jon Moulton: a Dickens of a venture capitalist”

The son of master engraver in the Potteries of Stoke-on-Trent, Jon Moulton’s background has something of Dickens about it too. “It was a horrid place when I was a child.” While the Moultons were not badly off by local standards, it was a tough upbringing. “There were extreme pollution from coal from the pottery industry, hence the TB and things [Moulton struggled with tuberculosis as a child]. It wasn’t until I was about 25 that I realised I’d been living in a valley because you could never see across the bloody thing.” His early ill-health meant he spent a lot of time as a child shadowing his grandfather, a successful entrepreneur, around his engineering business “because there was nobody else to look after me”.

Urgent

Despite having a personal fortune estimated at more than £150m, he has never seen a more urgent need for a heavy dose of austerity for Britain, insisting any other perspective is economically flawed and immoral. “The reality is there is no simple piece of arithmetic that says squirting more money into the economy will generate enough growth to compensate for the damage that the additional debt will do.

“The economic situation is so fundamentally dire and plastered with language to make sure that people can’t understand it. Fiscal consolidation, quantitative easing, they don’t mean anything to most people.”

Moulton sounds for all the world like a latterday version of Dickens’s ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Whether his voice will be heeded remains to be seen.

Born Stoke-on-Trent, October 1950

Education Hanley high school; read chemistry at Lancaster University

Career Chartered accountant at Coopers & Lybrand; Citicorp Venture Capital; managing partner at Schroder Ventures (later Permira); Apax Partners; 1997 – founded Alchemy; 2009 – left to start Better Capital, saying Alchemy was “not what it was”

Family Married, two children; homes in Kent, London, Guernsey and France

Interests Trustee and donor of Stem Cell Foundation; angel investor in 100 firms, including fund manager Ashmore Group, now in FTSE 100.

For more on this story go to:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/dec/01/jon-moulton-venture-capitalist-liam-fox