Gerald Corbett

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Gerald Corbett is an [executive] businessman in the United Kingdom. Described by David Freud in his book "Freud in the City" as "immensely approachable, a short and jovial figure, full of impromptu quips relayed to the accompaniment of short, barks of laughter", he has been a director of ten Public Companies - four of them as Chairman, but he is most notable for once being the chief executive of Railtrack.

After studying history at Cambridge University, where he was a foundation scholar, he attended London and Harvard business schools before joining Boston Consulting Group, which advises on corporate strategy, in the mid-70s. In 1982, he joined electrical retailer Dixons, where he became group Financial Controller and Corporate Finance Director.

He left after five years to be Group Finance Director at international building materials firm Redland. In 1993, he became Group Finance Director of Grand Metropolitan, the food and drink giant. When "Grand Met" merged with Guinness to form Diageo, he lost his job to his counterpart at Guinness.

In summer 1997, he was appointed Chief Executive of Railtrack, which he left in November 2000.

In March 2001, he was back at the helm of another major company, Woolworths, appointed to oversee the demerger of Woolworths Group from Kingfisher. Once this was completed in August 2001, he remained on the board as Chairman.

In October 2003, he was appointed non-executive chairman of Health Club Holdings, the Holmes Place fitness clubs business, which he stepped down from at the end of 2005 following his appointment as Chairman of soft drinks company Britvic, to oversee its flotation in December 2005 on the London Stock Exchange. He has also been non-executive director of Burmah-Castrol plc and the MEPC property group. In July 2005 he was appointed as Chairman of SSL, the company that manufactures and sells internationally Durex contraceptives and Scholl footwear and footcare products.

In July 2007 it was announced that he would become Chair of the Royal National Institute of the Deaf on the 26 October 2007. He stepped down as chairman of Woolworths at the AGM in June 2006 after completing his second three year term. He was appointed chairman of Moneysupermarket.com in July 2007, the leading price comparison website which floated on the London Stock Exchange in the same month. Since 2003 he has been a non-executive director of Greencore Plc, the Irish food company headquartered in dublin. He was Chairman of the Governess of Abbots Hill School between 1997-2002 and has been a governor of Luton University. ^[1]

[edit] Railtrack

Railtrack was the most controversial of the Conservative government privatisations. The railway was dismembered into over 100 different pieces of which by far the largest was Railtrack which owned and operated the infrastructure. The privatisation was bitterly opposed by Labour who maintained their hostility to the company throughout its existence.Yet Railtracks annual reports and in a series of regulatory submissions and documents published by the office of the Rail Regulatory, under Corbett, train punctuality improved to levels not seen before (or since), investment rose, profits increased, the share price went up and the safety record steadily improved. 1998 was the first year since 1902 in which no passenger died in a train crash. In 1998 Railtrack rescued the Channel Tunnel Rail link, which was subsequently delivered on budget and on time. By the year 2000, 20% more people were travelling by rail than under old BR.

At the time of his appointment, Corbett admitted to journalists that he had no experience whatever of the industry. In September 1997, three weeks after his appointment, a First Great Western express train from Swansea collided with a freight train at Southall, West London, killing seven passengers. Twenty seven months later, in October 1999, another Intercity train collided with a commuter train near Paddington, killing 31 people. It was Britain's worst rail disaster in a decade. Nevertheless, Corbett survived the pressure to resign from his job. Alastair Morton Chairman fo the Strategic Rail Authority said in a speech the week following the crash that "Railtrack should be grateful for the leadership Gerald Corbett has shownin the aftermath of the crash".

In early 2000, he made a public apology on the BBC's Today programme on behalf of Railtrack: "The work we have done has..... been truly dreadful and it's largely down to us and our contractors. We are trying to do a hell of a lot of work and the way we have been doing it has not been good enough."

A year after the Paddington crash, in October 2000, a train from London to Leeds derailed at Hatfield, resulting in four deaths. Corbett’s resignation was initially rejected by the Railtrack board following wide public support. The Times Leader of October 19th titled "Staying Power", stated that his departure would be " a disaster for Britaons rail-ways", but he eventually left with a compensation package estimated to be worth £1.3m in total (of which £900,000 was his accrued pension benefit).

Corbett was personified on the London stage in David Hare's "The Permanent Way" and in the television film "Derailed". These dramatisations showed the private tension beneath the public face and noted that Corbett had his own share of personal tragedy. His father was killed at an early age by a drunk driver in a car accident. Corbett is married to an artist. Together they have four children, and he himself is one of five brothers.