Defence giant BAE Systems has confirmed the appointment of City veteran Sir Roger Carr as its next chairman.
Sir Roger, who stepped down as president of the CBI lobby group earlier this week, will replace Dick Olver, who has held the role for nine years.
Sir Roger, 66, was chairman of Cadbury during its £10 billion takeover by Kraft and has been chairman of British Gas owner Centrica since 2004.
He will join the BAE board as chairman designate in October and will succeed Mr Olver in the first quarter of 2014. Sir Roger will quit his role at Centrica next year.
The BAE post is one of the highest profile in the City as the company employs about 100,000 people worldwide and is a major player in the US defence market.
It builds the Typhoon fighter jet and nuclear submarines and provides companies and governments with cyber security. Last year, BAE failed in an attempt to merge with Europe's EADS, the owner of Airbus.
The collapse of the merger led to calls from BAE's biggest shareholder for Mr Olver to stand down.
BAE's senior independent director Nick Rose said Sir Roger was the "outstanding" candidate with two decades of board-level experience.
He added: "His skills, reputation and relationships with investors and government ministers will be of considerable value to the company both at home and abroad."
Sir Roger said he felt privileged to be offered the role: "BAE Systems is strategically important not just for the UK but internationally, playing a key role in the defence industry in the US and in other parts of the world.
"I have long admired the company which has a remarkable heritage for innovation and technology.
"It is well-positioned in a rapidly evolving industry to face uncertainties around defence budgets and has great opportunities in new geographies and technologies. It is my intention to build on these strong foundations in the years ahead."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article