Lord Penrose | |
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Personal details | |
Born | George William Penrose 2 June 1938 Port Glasgow |
Nationality | British |
Occupation | Judge |
Profession | Advocate |
George William Penrose, Lord Penrose, PC (born 2 June 1938), [1] is a Scottish judge (from 1990) and member of the Privy Council (from 2000) who sat in the Court of Session, the supreme civil court.
He qualified as a chartered accountant, was admitted to the bar as an advocate and was made Senior Counsel in 1978. Between 1988 and 1990 he worked in Crown Office, the prosecution service for Scotland. He was made Scotland’s first commercial judge in 1994 and was acknowledged as an expert in commercial law. [2] He chaired two major independent inquiries, establishing in each case complex authoritative narratives of events.
Lord Penrose was responsible for chairing the public inquiry that produced The Penrose Report into the near-collapse of the mutual life assurance company Equitable Life. In 2001, Lord Penrose was asked by the Treasury to investigate the history of the company. His 818-page report was published on 8 March 2004. [3] The Report cost £2.5 million and was non-statutory, meaning in particular that it did not have powers to compel attendance. [4] His conclusions (Chapter 19) drew attention, amongst other things, to the inadequately skilled membership of the Board and to the problem that regulatory focus on solvency did not appropriately focus on PRE (policyholders' reasonable expectations) as to final bonus. The Report detailed the history of the fund. It highlighted the long-term underlying weakness of a fund where the capital assets were unfairly held so as to benefit crystallised maturities disproportionately (Chapter 20). This inclusion of PRE as an operative part of the business that required to be supervised formed thereafter a baseline for the European Parliament Report in 2007 into lessons to be learned at the wider European level. [5] In consequence, the 2007 Report demanded that terminal payments and liabilities across the entire European Union must be the subject of regulatory supervision and anticipatory provision. [6] This proved to be the wider legacy of the Penrose Report.
Lord Penrose also headed the Penrose Inquiry into Hepatitis C & HIV infections from NHS Scotland treatment with blood and blood products such as Factor VIII. The Report was described to the House of Commons in Westminster as providing "the first authoritative narrative" of the events in question. The House was also informed that Lord Penrose had taken 150 statements from witnesses and relatives and had considered over 118,000 documents. [7]
The Carnegie Medal for Writing, established in 1936, is a British literary award that annually recognises one outstanding new English-language book for children or young adults. It is conferred upon the author by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), who calls it "the UK's oldest and most prestigious book award for children's writing". CILIP is currently partnered with the audio technology company Yoto in connection with the award.
The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize was a literary prize awarded annually for the best work of literature by an author from the Commonwealth aged 35 or under, written in English and published in the United Kingdom. Established in 1942, it was one of the oldest literary awards in the UK.
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The Nestlé Children's Book Prize, and Nestlé Smarties Book Prize for a time, was a set of annual awards for British children's books that ran from 1985 to 2007. It was administered by BookTrust, an independent charity that promotes books and reading in the United Kingdom, and sponsored by Nestlé, the manufacturer of Smarties candy. It was one of the most respected and prestigious prizes for children's literature.
The Galton Laboratory was a laboratory established for the research of eugenics, later to the study of biometry and statistics, and eventually human genetics based at University College London (UCL) in London, England. The laboratory was originally established in 1904 and existed in name until 2020.
The Carnegie Medal for Illustration is a British award that annually recognises "distinguished illustration in a book for children". It is conferred upon the illustrator by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) which inherited it from the Library Association. CILIP is currently partnered with the audio technology company Yoto in connection with the award, though their sponsorship and the removal of Greenaway’s name from the medal proved controversial.
The Equitable Life Assurance Society, founded in 1762, is a life insurance company in the United Kingdom. The world's oldest mutual insurer, it pioneered age-based premiums based on mortality rate, laying "the framework for scientific insurance practice and development" and "the basis of modern life assurance upon which all life assurance schemes were subsequently based". After closing to new business in 2000, parts of the business were sold off and the remainder of the company became a subsidiary of Utmost Life and Pensions in January 2020.
The Richard Dawkins Award is an annual prize awarded by the Center for Inquiry (CFI). It was established in 2003 and was initially awarded by the Atheist Alliance of America coordinating with Richard Dawkins and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. In 2019, the award was formally moved to CFI. CFI is a US nonprofit organization that variously claims on its website to promote reason, science, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values, or science, reason, and secular values. The award was initially presented by the Atheist Alliance of America to honor an "outstanding atheist", who taught or advocated scientific knowledge and acceptance of nontheism, and raised public awareness. The award is currently presented by the Center for Inquiry to an individual associated with science, scholarship, education, or entertainment, and who "publicly proclaims the values of secularism and rationalism, upholding scientific truth wherever it may lead." They state that the recipient must be approved by Dawkins himself.
Lady Elish Frances Angiolini is a Scottish lawyer who currently serves as Lord Clerk Register. Angiolini has worked at the University of Oxford since 2012 and has been identified as a potential candidate in the 2024 University of Oxford Chancellor election.
James Arthur David Hope, Baron Hope of Craighead, is a retired Scottish judge who served as the Lord President of the Court of Session and Lord Justice General, Scotland's most senior judge, and later as first Deputy President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom from 2009 until his retirement in 2013. He had previously been the Second Senior Lord of Appeal in Ordinary. He is the Chief Justice of Abu Dhabi Global Market Courts.
The Orwell Prize is a British prize for political writing. The Prize is awarded by The Orwell Foundation, an independent charity governed by a board of trustees. Four prizes are awarded each year: one each for a fiction and non-fiction book on politics, one for journalism and one for "Exposing Britain's Social Evils" ; between 2009 and 2012, a fifth prize was awarded for blogging. In each case, the winner is the short-listed entry which comes closest to George Orwell's own ambition to "make political writing into an art".
Michelle Georgina Mone, Baroness Mone, is a Scottish businesswoman and life peer. She has set up several businesses, including MJM International Ltd in 1996 and the lingerie company Ultimo along with her then husband Michael Mone. Other ventures include naturopathic 'weight-loss' pills, and a fake tan product via Ultimo Beauty.
The contaminated blood scandal, also known as the infected blood scandal, was a British medical scandal in which a large number of people were infected with hepatitis C and HIV, as a result of receiving contaminated blood or contaminated clotting factor products. Many of the products were imported from the US, and distributed to patients by the National Health Service throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Most recipients had haemophilia or had received a blood transfusion following childbirth or surgery. It was estimated that more than 30,000 patients had received contaminated blood, resulting in the deaths of at least 3,000 people. In July 2017, Prime Minister Theresa May announced an independent public inquiry into the scandal, and its findings are due to be reported in May 2024.
Arthur Neslen is a British-born journalist and author. Nelsen has especially covered Middle East issues, fossil lobbies' influence on European institutions and climate change. He served as journalist for Haaretz, Jane's Information Group, The Observer, The Guardian, and as a correspondent for the websites of The Economist and al-Jazeera. NGOs credited policy changes at the European commission, international financial institutions and wildlife regulatory agencies in part to Neslen’s work.
TheWriters' Prize, previously known as the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Folio Prize and The Literature Prize, is a literary award that was sponsored by the London-based publisher The Folio Society for its first two years, 2014–2015. Starting in 2017, the sponsor was Rathbone Investment Management. At the 2023 award ceremony, it was announced that the prize was looking for new sponsorship as Rathbones would be ending their support. In November 2023, having failed to secure a replacement sponsor, the award's governing body announced its rebrand as The Writers' Prize.
Michael Benedict Emmerson CBE KC is a British barrister, specialising in public international law, human rights and humanitarian law, and international criminal law. From 2011 to 2017, he was the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism. Emmerson is currently an Appeals Chamber Judge of the UN Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals sitting on the Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. He has previously served as Special Adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, and Special Adviser to the Appeals Chamber of the ECCC.
The Penrose Inquiry was the public inquiry into hepatitis C and HIV infections from NHS Scotland treatment with blood and blood products such as factor VIII, often used by people with haemophilia. The event is often called the Tainted Blood Scandal or Contaminated Blood Scandal.
Walter Sofronoff is an Australian jurist and lawyer who served as the President of the Queensland Court of Appeal (2017–2022) and as the Solicitor-General of Queensland from 2005 to 2014.
Sheku Ahmed Tejan Bayoh died after being restrained by police in Kirkcaldy, Scotland. His death sparked controversy, and an independent government inquiry following a police investigation.
Lord Penrose, a former Senator of the College of Justice in Scotland, 73