Ray Perman

Ray Perman, BA MBA FRSE. Trustee since 2019

Ray Perman started his working life as a journalist on newspapers including The Times and the Financial Times, before co-founding the business magazine company Insider Publications Ltd in 1983.  The business was sold to Trinity Mirror plc in 1999. He was an executive director of Caledonian Publishing plc, which bought the Glasgow Herald from Lonrho in 1992 and sold it to Scottish Media Group in 1996.

From 2005-2013 he was chair of the Access to Finance Expert Group, which advised the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills on policy relating to SME finance. He was a member of the board of Scottish Enterprise from 2004-2009 and chair of Social Investment Scotland, which makes loans to the social economy, from 2001-2009. He is a former member of the court of Heriot Watt University and chaired three small companies including his son’s radio and digital media business.

From 2011-17 he chaired the James Hutton Institute, a scientific research organisation working in the fields of environmental sustainability and food security, and from 2014-17 he was Director of the David Hume Institute, which commissions research and organises seminars on economic, political, social and business issues affecting Scotland.

He is author of HUBRIS: How HBOS Wrecked the Best Bank in Britain (2012) and a  biography of the Gaelic scholar John Lorne Campbell, The Man Who Gave Away His Island (2010). His financial history of Edinburgh, The Rise and Fall of the City of Money, will be published in autumn 2019.