ROGER Mitchell, the former Scottish Premier League chief executive, and Allan Burns, the director of Diageo Scotland, are among five figures who have been identified by Scottish businesses as possible recruits in the government’s campaign to get fresh blood into blue-chip boardrooms.

Heleen Kist, a corporate advisor with extensive experience of running technology start-ups; Gervase Cottam, the chief executive of brand management group Chartered Brands; and Khaled Shahbo, director of Enterprise Rent-A-Car (Scotland) are other potential candidates.

The government has launched a programme to find around 2,000 new non-executive directors following a damning review of company boards by Derek Higgs, a former investment banker. His report, launched in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom scandals, suggested non-executive directors, whose key role is to ensure good management on behalf of shareholders, lacked independence because many of them had held their positions for many years or had too many seats on other boards to focus on the job.

Mitchell resigned from the SPL last December after a major split between the clubs over TV cash and voting rights. He was nominated as a potential non-exec by Craig Paterson, the former chairman of recruitment agency Melville Craig.  Mitchell had experience that "most business people would give their eye teeth for", Paterson claimed. Before joining the world of football, Mitchell was finance director and chief operating officer of EMI/Virgin Music in Italy, with responsibility for a company with a turnover of $45m and a staff of 30.  He has also worked for Italian company Panini, and has extensive merger and acquisition experience.

Burns is credited with helping transform the fortunes of Diageo’s Scottish operations, and is a prominent CBI council member. Shonaig Macpherson, the senior partner at law firm McGrigor Donald, nominated him for his ethical approach. She said: "I believe that Allan’s work ethic, his inclusive approach and business acumen, on a global scale, would benefit Scottish companies in this current climate." Burns has a 30-year career spanning the whisky, oil and motor industry, and currently supervises the supply chain management of over 50 million cases of Diageo brands to 180 markets worldwide.

Kist moved to Scotland only last year. She is a freelance consultant and interim manager and is currently working with a number of start-ups. Her boardroom credentials were highlighted by the veteran corporate financier Mary Campbell.

Campbell said: "Despite her relative young age (32), Heleen has accumulated a wealth of experience as an entrepreneur, a chief executive, an investment executive and as a management consultant to start-ups as well as to FTSE 100 boards."

Kist has extensive experience of the technology sector, and is a former chief executive of a London-based software group. Her work is required reading at Stanford University and she speaks five languages.

Shahbo is vice-president and director of Enterprise Rent-a-car and as such is responsible for the Scottish operations of one of the largest car rental groups in the world. He held a number of positions for Enterprise, before moving to Scotland in 1996. John Maguire, the head of Phoenix Motors, nominated Shahbo. He said: "Khaled’s personal qualities of common sense, infectious enthusiasm, good humour and a confidence that sadly is much more new world than old Caledonia make him a good powerful additional to any boardroom." Shahbo is a member of the Entrepreneurial Exchange.

Cottam has a wealth of experience in doing business with multinational groups. He is a former marketing director of Pringle, and has successfully built his own company Chartered Brands into a successful firm, operating in several consumer markets. Gordon Cairns, director at Cairns Bond, said Cottam would give companies something extra. He said: "Gervase has a wealth of experience, both as an entrepreneur and a director of major companies. More importantly, however, he will continually bring fresh thinking to the direction of a business."

Although non-executive directors are traditionally close to the end of their business careers, the Higgs Report will see younger, more dynamic candidates take up board room positions as the gene pool widens. But the response of blue-chips to the report so far has been spectacularly negative.

Nearly all FTSE companies are expected to be in breach of the corporate governance guidelines a year after they come into effect, according to a new report from the Glasgow management consultancy Hay Group. Its poll of FTSE 350 companies found that over a quarter of respondents (28%) are not intending to comply with Higgs’ recommendation that half of boards are made up of independent non-exec directors.

Nearly half of all companies (46%) said they would disregard Higgs’ finding that a non-exec should not sit on all three of the key audit, remuneration and appointment committees. Bill Brackenridge, head of the Hay Group, said: "A remarkably small percentage of companies will be compliant at the end of year one." The Hay Group survey also found that 72% of companies do not have board performance evaluated at least once a year. In addition, it found that 4% of FTSE respondents were not intending to comply with the Higgs recommendation that boards are assessed every 12 months.

One in three companies said they needed to recruit new non-executive directors, to fill the void left by the Higgs recommendations that limit the number of posts held by non-execs. This means that companies in the Scotsman 50 index of leading Scottish PLCs might need to find over 100 new non-executives between them. Brackenridge added: "It is no small task for one in three FTSE 350 companies to find new non-execs, in the same way that it would not be easy to find a third more GPs within a year."

Briefing

The Hay Group report, which examines "The DNA of the NED", looks at the implications of the Higgs Report and the characteristics of the new breed of non-execs. It said that non-execs should have "insightful integrity" - an ability to understand the business and the resolve to act solely on behalf of shareholders, even if this means coming into conflict with the board.