Rupert Pennant-Rea

The son of Peter Athelwold and Pauline Pennant-Rea, he was educated at the Peterhouse Boys' School, an Anglican church boarding school near Marandellas, Rhodesia (now Marondera, Zimbabwe), before attending Trinity College, Dublin,[1] and Manchester University,[1] where he received his MA degree. He is married, and has three children and one step-daughter.

Pennant-Rea joined the Bank of England in 1973 and remained until 1977, when he left to work for The Economist magazine.[1] He was the magazine's editor from 1986 until 1993.[2] Between 1993 and 1995, he again joined the Bank of England as Deputy Governor of the bank, under the governorship of Edward George;[1] he resigned following reports of an extramarital affair. It was reported that financial journalist Mary Ellen Synon had been smuggled into the Bank of England under an assumed name, and that she and Pennant-Rea had had sex on the carpet of the governor's dressing room.[3]

In 1994 he became a member of the influential Washington-based financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty.

In 1995 he became a director of a Canadian mining company, Sherritt International.. In March 1996, he was banned from the USA (along with his wife at the time and under-age children) because of Sherritt's commercial interests in Cuba, under the terms of the USA's Helms-Burton Act..

Pennant-Rea was chairman of British company The Stationery Office following its privatisation in 1996.[4] He was a British American Tobacco director from 1998 to 2007. He was also Chairman of Henderson Group and a non-executive director of Go-Ahead Group, a transport company, First Quantum and Gold Fields, both mining companies.

In July 2009, Pennant-Rea was appointed non-executive chairman of The Economist Group, having served as a non-executive director since August 2006.. In July 2018, after nine years, he was succeeded by Paul Deighton. He was Chairman of Royal London,[5] Chairman of PGI, an agriculture company, and a National Independent director of Times Newspapers.[6]. Pennant-Rea recently became Chairman of a start-up, Learning with Experts https://www.learningwithexperts.com/, focused on life-long learning.

In the non-profit sector, Pennant-Rea is a trustee of the Marjorie Deane Foundation, the Wincott Foundation and the Speakers Trust,[7] the UK's leading public-speaking training charity. He was Chairman of the Shakespeare Schools Festival and is currently Chairman of Healing Venezuela.[8] Pennant-Rea has written a series of books about economics and a novel, Gold Foil.