Weir's Cochrane appoints successor as FD

Ernst & Young partner Jon Stanton has joined Scottish FTSE-250 engineering group Weir as its finance director, replacing Keith Cochrane who was made CEO late last year. It is his first FD role.

Stanton has been with E&Y since 1998 and was made partner in the London office in 2001, taking on lead responsibility for auditing a number of FTSE-100 clients including Invensys, Hanson and InterContinental Hotels.

Weir welcomed the addition of Stanton’s extensive experience in corporate finance ranging from mergers and acquisitions, restructuring and business process improvement projects. The company said he also had extensive international experience. He will formally start work in Spring after completing existing client commitments.

Eyebrows were raised by the appointment of an E&Y auditor given that Weir’s auditor is E&Y. But a spokesperson for the business has defended the appointment, saying that Stanton had no involvement with the Weir account during his time at the firm.

Stanton inherits a much refreshed and tidied finance function as his predecessor Cochrane spent the past couple of years shoring up the finances of the business and streamlining its processes.

Cochrane was made CEO last September after four years in the FD’s job. An experienced head, he gained notoriety when he became CEO at Stagecoach in 2000 and spent two years fire fighting various operational and financial issues in its American business. He resigned after an American publication said that he had called the business’s Stateside customers “riff raff”, which he denied. He had been brought into Stagecoach as financial controller by founder Brian Souter, his first role in business after qualifying with Arthur Andersen.

Interviewed by Financial Director in June 2009, Cochrane denied being interested in the CEO role at Weir, saying that after having reorganised its finance function and dealt with its pension risk he was “pretty comfortable” in his job. But circumstances revealed otherwise when previous CEO Mark Selway had an offer to return to his native Australia to take up a job there.

“I enjoy the FD role, particularly in an organisation like Weir where it gives you breadth of coverage,” he told us last June. “I think the financial side is fascinating and in the modern world where you partner with your chief executive, frankly, you can get almost as much exposure being an FD as you can being a CEO. It’s a badge that gives you the ability to dip into most things across an organisation.”

Cochrane left Stagecoach in 2002 to become director of group financial reporting at ScottishPower, but was passed over for the group FD role when Simon Lowth, then a McKinsey consultant and now CFO at AstraZeneca, was brought in for the job. “I’d be daft if I said I didn’t want it,” he told Financial Director of his wish to become ScottishPower FD. “It would have been agreeable.”

To read our profile of Keith Cochrane, click here