John Minshull-Beech
John Minshull-Beech - educated at Oxford University where he took a degree in Chemistry. He qualified as a chartered accountant with Arthur Andersen in 1983, where he specialised in corporate taxation with particular emphasis in the oil and gas sector. He then spent four years at the investment bank, Morgan Grenfell - now part of the Deutsche Bank group - in the corporate finance department.
At Morgan Grenfell (October 1983 - January 1988) he was involved in several flotations, corporate restructuring and refinancing, tax planning for a wide range of domestic and international transactions, mergers and acquisitions.
In January 1988 he joined Chelsfield, a property investment and development group with leisure interests in hotels and Wentworth Golf Club. He was closely involved in taking Chelsfield public in 1990 and was responsible for corporate acquisitions, non-property and leisure investments and was on the boards of several of the Group's major operating subsidiaries. He was also involved in the Group's banking and project and joint venture funding and oversaw the Group's tax planning function.
He left Chelsfield in June 1998 to become a founding director of Skye Capital Partners Limited, a privately financed venture capital fund based in London. Skye Capital made a number of investments during 1998 in the property and specialty chemical sectors before concentrating on the technology and telecoms sectors during 1999 and 2000. Following the worldwide downturn in the technology sectors in 2001, Skye sustained losses and its backers decided to cease further investing. Skye ceased operations towards the end of 2001.
In February 2002, Mr Minshull-Beech was asked back to Chelsfield to undertake a £65 million rights issue and a corporate acquisition and during the last few years was involved in raising debt finance for a number of the Group's operations. In 2003 he became involved in the data centre division of Chelsfield which had acquired Global Switch some years previously. He was part of the team responsible for the successful formation of the Global Switch Limited Partnership between Chelsfield and Aviva comprising six data-centres in five major European cities valued at £366 million which completed in 2004. He was on the board of the German operating subsidiaries at Global Switch.
From February 2005 to September 2005, he assisted in the restructuring of Duelguide on behalf of two of the three shareholders - the Multiplex Group which is a quoted Australian entity and Aldersgate Investments, a private company controlled by David and Simon Reuben who are British entrepreneurs. This involved raising additional equity form the consortium and some £400 million of senior and junior debt.
In 2007, together with Mr Eddy Shah, a British entrepreneur, he established Green Ladder Homes, a company which specialises in developing in ‘green', energy-efficient homes targeted at the affordable residential sector. He has concluded funding agreements with a specialist funder of social housing and Green Ladder has identified a number of sites on which schemes and planning applications are currently being drawn up. John's involvement with Green Ladder Homes continues on a number of discrete projects.
In 2009, Mr Minshull-Beech assisted in the refinancing of a Californian telecoms group, Bitek International, which provides security and monitoring systems for national telecoms networks.
John joined the Galileo team in May 2010, to help in raising additional finance for projects and to consider additional financing methods for certain of its development schemes.
