Presentation of the proposed new Board members Conrad Neil Phoenix Born in 1944 Co-founder of Solargise Qualified as a Chartered Surveyor and a member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) Fellow of FRICS (the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors) Conrad Neal Phoenix is a shareholder and non-executive director in Solargise (UK) Limited. He is a chartered surveyor, who set up his own practice specialising in commercial property in the City of London in 1969. His practice is specialised in all aspects of industrial property and his clients included Barclays Bank Pension Fund, The 3i Group, and many other institutions. In 1983 he became a commercial property developer and has been involved in many commercial developments comprising retails parks, office building and industrial estates, primarily in and around London and the South of England. Neal is no longer actively involved in development, but focuses his time on running his family's investment portfolio. He is a Member of the Order of the British Empire and was awarded that honour having spent decades of his life helping run several different charities relating to health, education and sport. Conrad Neil Phoenix is independent of the company. He is not independent of its major shareholders, if Fitztroy’s investment will realize. Fitzroy is a London-based private equity investor which is owned currently 100% by Neil Macleod, but which is expected to be majority-owned at a later stage by Conrad Neil Phoenix and Neil Macleod.
Jyoti Desai Born in 1957 BA (Hons) B Com Economics and Law CAIB (SA) – Financial Services qualification Jyoti Desai is a banking and telecoms professional with more than 35 years in the industry. Her achievements in banking at Standard Bank include driving large scale transformation in the banking industry when the sector moved to streamline operational cost and shift focus to customer centric, segment-based value propositions. Her strength lies in executing large scale projects in extremely challenging environments She spent 6 years in the fixed line business transforming IT architecture, improving service delivery and assisting Telkom in implementing its ICT services business which went beyond selling pipes only. She further led the build of several initiatives including a hosting data centre as well as a centralized GNOC for enterprise customers. In the mobile business she has been involved in start-ups in MTN in Nigeria and Iran. As COO she created an Iran business on the lean enterprise model which scaled to 30 million subscribers within 5 years. Today this business is still run on the foundations that were set up. As Group CTIO she has been instrumental in driving significant change in the network and IT space by driving focus towards business led capex spend and investment-based on ROI in a competitive pricing environment with diminishing capex returns. This includes outsourcing and managed services. Several standardisation projects were implemented. She has also driven shared services in the East African hub ad and ERP and back office group-wide shared services project. She also initiated a digital strategy across the MTN group as COO. She has been instrumental in driving mobile financial services including redesigning the apps for resilience in a high transaction environment and several marketing improvements in pricing and customer facing processes have been implemented. In 2014 an extensive A Customer Experience Management program was initiated with an initial focus on fixing the basics. In line with the digital aspirations a digital roadmap was developed for the technology function covering Network and IT evolution to ensure that the organinsation was able to become agile and reduce Time-to-Market for products and services. A large part of this was revitalization of BSS and OSS and Network Function Virtualisation. She has also been instrumental in helping business turnaround in struggling businesses by ensuring that the approach to the market is segment based and high value segments are serviced in a specialised manner. A key achievement is the turnaround in Nigeria after significant revenue share loss in the market from 2014 onwards. In December 2015 she successfully replaced the subscriber registration platform in Nigeria to drive the reregistration of 17 million subscribers over a 45-day period. Post retirement she has set up a digital practice focusing on CSPs and Financial services industries and has worked with operators in South Africa, Iran, Nigeria, Indonesia and Qata r . Jyoti Desai is independent of the company and its major shareholders.
Neil Macleod Born in 1971 Director of of various family property and engineering business Co-founder of Solargise HND in Engineering Systems (Napier University) Diploma in Agriculture and Farm Business (Royal Agricultural College) Masters in property Development and Planning Law (Southbank University) Neil initially worked for several years for his family engineering company in Edinburgh before moving to a management consultancy firm specialising in infrastructure project reorganisation in Southeast Asia. This focused on the redevelopment of the Malaysian state electricity network, the restructuring and extension of the Manila international container terminal and oil well life extension projects for Petronas Oil. This gave Neil an in-depth knowledge of working on large infrastructure projects in sometimes trying conditions. The key facts of efficiency and driving down costs being vital to the sustainability and profitability of the client companies. On return to the UK, Neil took a masters in property development and planning law and worked for Savills, the international firm of surveyors. Here he built up the India team specialising in large mixed use developments, leisure destinations and agri business. A considerable amount of work was put into the development of Jatropha as a viable industrial crop for bio fuels. This focused on Indian biotechnology being commercialised in Botswana and other sub-Saharan African countries, working to bring a new sustainable biofuel to the local and international market. It was during this period that Neil was approached by a client who had a plan to set up utility scale solar in India. Neil is one of the founders of Solargise along with Raj Basu and Conrad Phoenix. They have worked together for the last ten years to create the development company in India along with the new venture in North America. Solargise has grown significantly over the years with a dedicated development and engineering team in India supporting all aspects of the company internationally. They are a developer of utility scale solar projects in India and are currently fund raising to construct their own fully integrated manufacturing facility in Canada. Neil Macleod is independent of the company. He is not independent of its major shareholders, if Fitztroy’s investement will realize. Fitzroy is a London-based private equity investor which is owned currently 100% by Neil Macleod, but which is expected to be majority-owned at a later stage by Conrad Neil Phoenix and Neil Macleod.
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