Sir Tim Lankister arrives as new GBS board member

Higher Education provider GBS announces the appointment of a distinguished new member to its Advisory Board, bolstering its governance and scrutiny. Joining the Advisory Board is Sir Tim Lankester. 

Sir Tim Lankester studied economics at Cambridge and Yale. In 1966, he joined the World Bank as an economist, working in Washington, D.C. and then serving in the Bank’s New Delhi office.

In 1973, he joined the British civil service. He held senior positions at the Treasury: Undersecretary for monetary and financial affairs, and then as Britain’s director on the boards of the IMF, the World Bank, and the European Investment Bank.

Later, he served as Permanent Secretary in Department for International Development, and finally in the Department for Education. From 1978 to 1981 he was Private Secretary (Economic Affairs) to Prime Ministers Callaghan and Thatcher. From 1981 to 1983 he was seconded from the civil service to the investment bank, S.G. Warburg. He was knighted for public service in 1994.

After retiring from the civil service in 1996, he became Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London, from 2001 to 2009 he was President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. During his time in Oxford, he chaired the Admissions Executive, the body responsible for the university’s undergraduate admissions system.

He chaired the Council of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine between 2008 and 2014. From 2007 to 2015 he chaired the governing body of the London Contemporary Dance Trust and was a board member of the Conservatoire for Dance and Drama. Earlier he was a governor of the Royal College of Music. For ten years he was a member of the UK-India Roundtable.

In the private sector, he has served on the boards of several major organizations: CGU plc (later renamed Aviva), Smith and Nephew plc, Mitchell and Butlers plc, and the London Metal Exchange. He chaired the board of the Simba Fund (a closed-end fund investing in Africa and managed by ING Baring) and was on the management advisory board of the private equity firm, Actis.

Currently, he is on the management board of the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Art and Culture at the University of East Anglia He is a member of the Joint Advisory Board of Georgetown University in Doha; vice-chairman of the Tokyo-based charity Worldwide Support for Development; chairman of the Wells Maltings Trust, a multi-arts center in Norfolk; and advisor on Indonesia with the consulting firm, Oxford Analytica.

He has lectured and published articles on international aid, the 2008 international banking crisis, and on the Indian and Indonesian economies. In 2012, his book – “The Politics and Economics of Britain’s Foreign Aid: the Pergau Dam Affair” – was published by Routledge.