Robin Renwick

Robin William Renwick, or Lord Renwick of Clifton.

From the Website of the Zimbabwe Democracy Trust:

Lord Renwick was advisor to Lord Carrington during the negotiations which ended the war in Rhodesia and political advisor to Lord Soames during the ceasefire and elections leading to the independence of Zimbabwe. He served subsequently as Ambassador to South Africa in the period leading to the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the African National Congress. He received an honorary degree from the University of the Witwatersrand for his contribution to the struggle against apartheid. He served as Ambassador to the United States from 1991-1995. Lord Renwick subsequently became Deputy Chairman of the merchant bank, Robert Fleming, and is currently Vice-Chairman, Investment Banking for JPMorgan (Europe). Both banks have played a leading role in the attraction of new investment to Southern Africa. He serves on the boards of a number of companies with important interests in Southern Africa - SABMiller, BHP Billiton, Harmony Gold and Richemont. He was appointed to the House of Lords by Prime Minister Blair in 1997.

He was a member of the Butler Inquiry team, chaired by Robin Butler, Baron Butler of Brockwell, that determined that the intelligence used to declare Iraq's possession of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" was flawed. When Inge was appointed to sit in judgment on whether our spies were wrong about Iraq or whether their messages were distorted, he was still a member of the Hakluyt Foundation, a supervisory board for Hakluyt, a firm which hires former MI6 agents to work for private companies like Shell and BP.

Today, Lord Inge is also a consultant to BAe Systems, Vickers plc., Investcorp (a Middle Eastern bank), and OWR AG (a German firm making gas masks, protective suits, decontamination trailers and other specialist protection against nuclear, biological and chemical warfare). Since 2003, the year it was created, Lord Inge is the non-executive chairman of Aegis Defence Services, a London-based company which offers mercenaries and related services to governments at war. Aegis was awarded a $293 million contract by the Pentagon in May 2004 to act as the "coordination and management hub" for the fifty-plus private security companies in Iraq. They also contributed seventy-five teams of eight armed civilians each to assist and protect the Project Management Office of the United States and provided protection for the Oil-for-Food Program inquiry. The CEO of Aegis is Lt. Col. Tim Spicer, a former officer of the SAS and a former CEO of Sandline International.