Business big shot: Jim Smart, finance director, Premier Foods

by Miles Costello - 13/10/2009

"Jim Smart seems to have a knack for flushing out takeovers. The Scot, 49, was named yesterday as the new finance director at Premier Foods, the UK’s biggest food producer and owner of the Branston Pickle and Hovis brands."

He was finance boss at Boots in 2005, when it was on the receiving end of a £7 billion bid from Alliance UniChem. He left AllianceBoots the following year, when the agreed deal to form one of Europe’s largest pharmacy groups was completed, to take charge of the finances at Friends Provident, then the UK’s fourth-biggest life and pensions provider.

In August 2007, only eight months after he had joined Friends, the insurer agreed an £8.4 billion merger deal with Resolution, Clive Cowdery’s first life insurance consolidator. Amid reported tensions between Mr Smart and Philip Moore, Friends’ chief executive at the time, he is understood to have questioned the insurer’s ambitious target of tripling new business profits over three years. Mr Moore eventually scrapped the target but subsequent worries about the insurer’s capital strength had left it vulnerable and Resolution pounced.

Mr Smart had planned to leave after the completion of the Resolution deal, but he agreed to stay on to carry out a review of the business after Friends was jilted out of the merger by Hugh Osmond’s Pearl Group that December. Finally, with his work completed in August, Mr Smart left Friends Provident. He starts work at Premier next Monday.

Premier built up an unsustainable debt burden through a series of acquisitions, including the £1.2 billion takeover of RHM, the Mr Kipling cakes maker, and a £400 million deak to buy Campbell Soup in the UK and Ireland. The group has effectively put its bid activity on hold after completing a £400 million share placing in March to help to repay some of its debt. Paul Thomas, Mr Smart’s M&A-loving predecessor at Premier, left the group after seven years partly because of the planned absence of deals.

The Perth-born Mr Smart, who took his degree at Edinburgh University, is married with two children. He trained as an accountant with Coopers & Lybrand, before joining Abbey National, the mortgage lender, where he rose to group financial controller. A former finance director at First National Bank, Mr Smart was also an independent director at F&C Asset Management, the fund manager previously majority-owned by Friends.

More Details: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/article6872038.ece