John Chisholm (executive)

Sir John Alexander Raymond Chisholm FREngCEng FIEE is a former chairman of the Medical Research Council, and former Chairman and former Chief Executive of QinetiQ.

Chisholm was born 27 August 1946 in India of Scottish parents and brought up in Calcutta.

John Chisholm was educated at Worth School, and later attended Cambridge University, reading Mechanical Sciences on a scholarship from General Motors. After completing his studies, he worked at GM from 1968 as a graduate apprentice before joining BP's computer consultancy firm Scicon in 1969. He joined leading systems house CAP and founded a divisional company within that group called CAP Scientific Ltd in 1979 of which he was managing director. In 1988 CAP merged with SEMA-METRA, a French company and the merged group was called Sema Group allowing it to trade in Europe where "CAP" was already used by an historical link with CAP-Gemini. SEMA-METRA was cash rich whereas CAP Group had a very strong order book. This allowed balancing of the new group's portfolio. In practice some would regard the move as a reverse takeover due to the relative strength of the French component of the company. Chisholm was UK managing director of Sema Group plc.

In 1991, Chisholm was asked by the UK Ministry of Defence to organize a number of their research organisations into a single entity, which eventually became the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) - the largest science and technology organisation in the UK. In July 2001, three quarters of DERA was spun off to form a new private company called QinetiQ. In late 2005 Chisholm became Executive Chairman of QinetiQ, being replaced as CEO by Graham Love. According to The Sunday Times his annual pay was £467,000 in 2004. His £129,000 investment in the company was later worth £23m (a 17,829.5% return on investment, almost 180 times the initial value of the investment, which led to suggestions the company was undervalued). In 2008, the chairman of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee accused Chisholm of "profiteering at the expense of the taxpayer". In response, Chisholm stated that the criticisms were “grossly unfair”, and that "the reshaping of QinetiQ had been the greatest achievement of my working life”. At that time, his stake was worth just over £21m.

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