FT Property Summit

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Speakers

Sir Terry Farrell CBE

Awarded the Royal Town Planning Institute’s Gold Medal in 2017, Sir Terry Farrell CBE is considered to be one of the world’s most influential architects, planners and urban designers.

During 50 years in practice he has completed many award winning buildings and masterplans including Embankment Place and The Home Office Headquarters as well as millennium projects such as The Deep in Hull and Centre for Life in Newcastle. UK Masterplans include Greenwich Peninsula, Paddington Basin and Newcastle Quayside.

In East Asia, notable projects include Incheon airport in Seoul, Beijing Station and Guangzhou Station in China (the largest in the world). In Hong Kong he has designed the Peak Tower, Kowloon Station development and the British Consulate. Throughout his career, he has championed urban planning and helped shape government policy on key issues. As recognition of this, in 2013 he was voted the individual who made the Greatest Contribution to London’s Planning and Development over the last 10 years. In London, he is the Mayor’s Design Advisor and advises the Department for Transport on high speed rail. He is Design Champion for the Thames Gateway, Europe’s largest regeneration project and masterplanner for the transformation of Holborn and Earls Court.

Sir Terry is a prominent voice in British architecture and planning. In 2014, at invitation of Ed Vaizey, the Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, Terry and his firm commenced the Farrell Review of Architecture and the Built Environment, to offer expert guidance on the direction of British architecture.

Martin Wolf CBE

Martin Wolf is Chief Economics Commentator and an Associate Editor at the Financial Times. He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 2000 “for services to financial journalism”. He was a member of the UK government’s Independent Commission on Banking between June 2010 and September 2011. His book The Shifts and the Shocks: What We’ve Learned—and Have Still to Learn—from the Financial Crisis was published by Penguin in 2014.

Mr Wolf is an honorary fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford University, Corpus Christi College, Oxford University and King’s College, London. In 2014, he was made a University Global Fellow of Columbia University, New York and a Senior Fellow in Global Economic Policy at its School of International Public Affairs. He is a member of the International Media Council of the World Economic Forum.

Mr Wolf was joint winner of the Wincott Foundation senior prize for excellence in financial journalism for 1989 and again for 1997. He won the RTZ David Watt memorial prize for 1994 and the “Commentator of the Year” award at the Business Journalist of the Year Awards of 2008. He was placed 15th in Foreign Policy’s list of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” in December 2009 and the “Ludwig Erhard Prize for economic commentary” for 2009. He won “Commentariat of the Year 2009” at the Comment Awards, the 33rd Ischia International Journalism Prize in 2012 and the Overseas Press Club of America’s prize for “best commentary on international news in any medium” for 2013.

Mr Wolf is also the author of Why Globalization Works (Yale University Press, 2004) and Fixing Global Finance (Washington D.C: Johns Hopkins University Press, and London: Yale University Press, 2008 and 2010). China Business News named Fixing Global Finance its “Financial Book of the Year” for 2009.

Mr Wolf was educated at Oxford University.

Melanie Leech

Melanie Leech joined the British Property Federation as Chief Executive in January 2015, following nine years as Director General of the Food and Drink Federation. Her role is to champion UK real estate and to promote a long-term, sustainable partnership between governments and the sector to deliver a high quality built environment, and to create wealth.

She previously held roles in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Office of the Rail Regulator and the Cabinet Office having joined the civil service (HM Customs) in 1988. She began her working life as a Police Constable in the Metropolitan Police Service.

Ms Leech is Chair of the CBI Trade Association Council and a Fellow of the RSA. In 2015 she was awarded a CBE for services to the food and drink industry.

Catherine Cook

Catherine Cook is a Partner in Clifford Chance's UK Real Estate team. She has significant experience in commercial and corporate real estate matters advising both domestic and international clients having worked both in the UK and the Middle East. Her work includes direct and indirect investments, joint ventures, portfolio sales and acquisitions, re-structuring transactions, sale and leasebacks, new HQ lettings for corporate occupiers and developments.

Catherine's client base includes institutional investors, funds (including sovereign wealth funds and fund managers), private equity houses, joint venture parties, property companies, corporate occupiers and financiers. She is well versed in advising clients on their portfolios of inbound and outbound investments and the potential risks and rewards that these present to their business. She is dual qualified having practised in both Scotland and England & Wales.

Catherine's client base includes both large global occupiers and investors who invest worldwide. She is conversant with the challenges that real estate investors and occupiers face. As someone who finds solutions to these challenges Catherine will bring an interesting and informed perspective to the Brexit panel discussion.

James Seppala

James Seppala is a Senior Managing Director in the Real Estate Group and the Head of Real Estate Europe, based in London. Since joining Blackstone in 2011, Mr Seppala has been involved in a number of Blackstone’s investments across Europe, including Logicor, OfficeFirst, Sponda, the Banco Popular REO & Loan Portfolio, and Multi Corporation.

Prior to joining Blackstone, Mr Seppala was a Vice President at Goldman Sachs & Co, where he spent 10 years focused on equity and debt investment opportunities in Europe and the United States on behalf of Goldman Sachs’s real estate private equity group.

M. Seppala graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 2001. M. Seppala currently serves as chairman of D. Carnegie & Co. (publ.) and as a board member of Sponda and The Office Group.

Ruth Cooke

Ruth Cooke joined Clarion Housing Group in April 2018 as Group Chief Executive of the country’s largest landlord with 125,000 homes nationwide.

She joined Clarion from Midland Heart where she served as Chief Executive Officer since 2012, having previously been the organisation’s Finance Director. While at Midland Heart, she transformed the organisation’s financial and operational performance. Ruth is a qualified accountant and corporate treasurer and her previous senior executive roles include Group Director of Resources at Knightstone Housing Association and Chief Finance Officer at Anchor Trust.

Lee Wainwright

Lee Wainwright joined Purplebricks in March 2017 as Operations Director before being promoted to COO and then UK CEO. A trainee estate agent direct from school, Mr Wainwright had a 26 year career at Countrywide, where he was responsible for brands like Bairstow Eves, Dixon’s Estate Agents, Abbott’s and RA Bennett’s & Partners. Latterly he was Managing Director for the London region.

Judith Evans

Judith Evans covers commercial and residential property for the Financial Times in London. She has previously covered investments at the FT and worked in Hong Kong, London and the Maldives for the newswires Agence France-Presse and Reuters.

Claer Barrett

Claer Barrett is the Financial Times' Personal Finance Editor as well as the editor of FT Money. She has worked for the FT group for over a decade, joining the Investors Chronicle magazine as the financial crisis took hold, specialising in property and buy-to-let investment. She became the FT's retail correspondent in 2011, then served as deputy UK news editor before being appointed to her current role. Her weekly Serious Money column won the Headline Money commentator of the year award in 2016 and 2017. A frequent contributor to TV and radio debates on personal finance and investing, she is an expert on the BBC1 series Right on the Money.

Edwin Heathcote

Edwin Heathcote is the FT's Architecture and Design Critic. He is an architect and designer and the author of around a dozen books including, most recently, The Meaning of Home. He writes a monthly column for GQ Magazine and is a regular contributor for magazines including Icon, Apollo and l'Architecture d'Aujord Hui. He is currently establishing an online archive of design writing.

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