 He was the first British-born black man to serve on the Board of a major UK public company (Reuters) and is a former non-executive director of Thomson Reuters (where he was a member of the Audit Committee), and is also a former non-executive director and Deputy Chairman of the Institute of Directors.He was a Director and Chairman of the Remuneration Committee of Canada's largest independent software developer, Open Text Corporation.More recently, he served as a non-executive director of Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC) from 2007 and from which he was fired over governance concerns after which he coined the expression "More Soviet than City" to describe the way he and Sir Richard Sykes had been treated.