WS Atkins boss Clarke to retire next month
If Keith Clarke, boss of Olympic engineer WS Atkins, didn't win London 2012 tickets in the public ballot, he might miss out on the festivities altogether as he announced his retirement from the business today.
Clarke, 59, will leave next month after eight years at the helm of Atkins, which had hundreds of engineers designing roads and sewers at the Stratford site. His replacement in one of the best-paid jobs in the consultancy industry will be German physicist Uwe Krueger, 46, who will join Atkins' board in two weeks and take over as chief executive on 1 August.
Krueger can expect similar remuneration to Clarke, who last year pocketed a pay package worth more than £922,000.
Allan Cook, Atkins' chairman said: "Keith steered the group back to being a high-performing business, successfully navigated a world recession and charted the course for growth. This is a natural time for him to hand the baton over to Uwe Krueger to continue the Group's development as a multi-national organisation."
Krueger's degree is in "complex system theory and brain research", and he has spent most of his career running engineering consultancies in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
