Forseke to take the chair at Alliance Trust

ALLIANCE Trust has recruited a chairman to succeed Lesley Knox, who announced her retirement last year after a boardroom battle with activist investors.

Swedish businesswoman Karin Forseke will join the Dundee-based trust on 1 March and will taken on the chairmanship on 2 April.

Forseke has been a non-executive director of the City watchdog, the Financial Services Authority, since 2004, a role in which she will continue until her term expires in July.

In 2007, Forseke resigned as the head of the Swedish government’s privatisation programme after the country’s financial services regulator censured and fined the country’s largest investment bank, D Carnegie, for overstating results.

Forseke had previously been chief executive of the bank, although the regulator did not implicate her in its findings and her tenure only briefly overlapped the period where the problems with oversight were highlighted.

Her other roles include that of chief operating officer of the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE) from 1996 to 1998.