Sir Kenneth Aphunezi OlisaOBECStJFRSAFBCS[1] (born 13 October 1951) is a British businessman and philanthropist. He is the first mixed heritage Lord-Lieutenant of Greater London. He founded and led the AIM-listed technology merchant bank Interregnum and now leads Restoration Partners. Ken Olisa is Past Master of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists and has served and serves on several boards of philanthropic, educational and regulator organisations. Sir Kenneth with his wife endowed the Olisa Library at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.
At IBM he held various posts before joining Wang Laboratories[5] in 1981. Following a period as marketing director for Europe, VP of US Marketing and then of Worldwide Marketing based in Boston, he was appointed Senior VP and general manager of Europe, Africa and the Middle East (EAME) located in Brussels. He led the team which restored the EAME operation to profitability, following which he launched an unsuccessful management buyout resulting in his departure in 1992.
Olisa then founded Interregnum, a technology merchant bank, leading it through its early growth, its entry into and exit from a joint venture with BDO Stoy Hayward, the AIM IPO in 2000. He was also a principal advisor to, and director of, uDate.com, which was later sold to Barry Diller's USA Interactive in 2003. Olisa retired from Interregnum in 2006 and now runs Restoration Partners.[6]
Olisa has considerable public company board-level experience on both sides of the Atlantic. 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),[7] 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. He also serves on the boards of, or is an adviser to, several privately held and innovative companies including the UK's leading corporate governance advisor Independent Audit.[8]
Olisa is also Chairman of the Thebes Group and not for profit Shaw Trust.[9]
In 2009, The Sunday Times named him Not for Profit non-executive director of the year, and in 2016 he was voted number one in the Powerlist's Top 10 most influential British black people.[10]
In November 2017, Olisa succeeded Adedotun Sulaiman as the Chairman of Interswitch and in 2018 he joined the Board of Huawei (UK) resigning in March 2022[11]
In January 2023, Olisa was appointed Chairman of BusinessLDN (formerly known as London First)[12] following the retirement of Paul Drechsler.
Honours and appointments
Olisa, speaking as Lord-Lieutenant of Greater London in 2018
Olisa is a Freeman of the City of London; President of Thames Reach, a charity working to shelter and resettle the homeless in London; Founder and Chairman of the Powerlist Foundation (now the Aleto Foundation); Fellow of the British Computer Society since 2006; Life Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; Life Fellow of the Institute of Directors; and, in 2021, he was appointed High Bailiff and Searcher of the Sanctuary of Westminster Abbey. In that role, he took part in the 2023 Coronation.[20]
Olisa is also a patron of several charities, including School-Home Support (SHS), a charity helping disadvantaged children and young people overcome barriers to education such as poverty, domestic abuse, and housing issues; Fore, a charity which funds scale-up initiatives for other charities; and the Black Cultural Archives. In 2019, he was appointed President of London Youth.[21]
