Sir Graeme Odgers, businessman who brought industry nous to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission

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28-05-2025

Sir Graeme Odgers, who has died aged 91, was a South African-born public servant and business leader who chaired the Monopolies and Mergers Commission.
Odgers brought unusually broad industrial and Whitehall experience to the leadership of the MMC – the body which had oversight between 1948 and 1999 of all major corporate mergers and competition issues – in which he succeeded the barrister Sir Godfrey Lequesne.
Appointed in 1993 by Michael Heseltine as president of the Board of Trade, Odgers was initially seen, as one profile put it, 'as very much someone in the Heseltine mould – pro-competition, pro-intervention, pro-industry' – and indeed, he acknowledged that he felt 'comfortable with Mr Heseltine's expressed viewpoint about competition'.
But like his predecessor, he firmly asserted the Commission's independence, while working to achieve a collegiate approach among its 35 part-time commissioners which minimised the incidence of dissenting 'minority reports'. Areas of controversy ranged from upmarket perfume manufacturers' refusal to supply supermarkets to the allegedly predatory takeover activities of the Stagecoach bus company – but none of the MMC's reports during his tenure were successfully challenged in the courts.
When he declined the offer of a second five-year term in 1997, one editorial noted that Odgers had blotted his copybook with ministers on only a handful of occasions and was 'generally reckoned to have made a decent fist of the MMC… It certainly made a pleasant change to have the place run for once by an industrialist rather than a clever lawyer.'
Graeme David William Odgers was born on March 10 1934 in a mining town outside Johannesburg to William Odgers, an engineer and mine manager for the Anglo-American mining group, and his wife Elizabeth, née Rennie. During the Second World War the family moved to Northern Rhodesia, where William managed copper production; Graeme returned to complete his schooling at St John's College in Johannesburg before taking ship to England aged 17 to study mechanical sciences at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
He returned to South Africa to start work with Anglo-American but left in 1957, shortly after getting married, to take an MBA as a Baker Scholar at Harvard Business School and to become an investment officer for the International Finance Corporation (an arm of the World Bank) in Washington.
Moving to the UK in 1962, he worked successively in management consultancy, merchant banking and insurance broking, then in 1970 established his own headhunting firm. But his path was diverted in early 1974 by a call from Peter Walker, the Heath government's secretary of state for trade and industry, to become an industrial adviser in the civil service.
Graeme Odgers left the recruitment business (which thrived in the hands of his younger brother Ian and is now Odgers Berndtson) and accepted the Whitehall challenge – only to find himself working after the March 1974 election for the Left-wing Labour firebrand Tony Benn, whom he found charming but 'startlingly naive' in his understanding of companies and markets.
Odgers's role, as head of the department's Industrial Development Unit, was to temper with financial realism Benn's political urge to achieve state control and greater trade union power within a succession of failing industrial sectors, including shipbuilding and carmaking.
He returned to the private sector in 1978 to work briefly for GEC, and then for eight years with the construction group Tarmac, where he rose to be group managing director. Meanwhile, he had joined the board of British Telecom as a part-time member in preparation for its 1984 privatisation, switching to an executive role as group managing director during a challenging period of technological and cultural change from 1987 to 1990.
His final industrial job before joining the MMC was as chief executive of another construction business, Alfred MacAlpine, and he was later a director of Scottish & Southern Energy. But the last phase of his working life was largely devoted to the economic development of his home county of Kent, particularly its less prosperous eastern parts.
As chairman of the county council's inward investment agency, Locate in Kent, and later of its economic board, he took a leading role in initiatives which included the redevelopment of the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury and the establishment of the Turner Contemporary gallery at Margate. Recalled by colleagues for a calm and gentlemanly style, combined with steely determination to reach his objectives, he also supported these and other chosen causes by extensive personal philanthropy.
He was knighted in 1997 for his MMC work and was appointed a deputy lieutenant of Kent in 2002. He held the freedom of the City of Canterbury and received the Kent Invicta Award in 2009.
Graeme Odgers married first, in 1957, Diana Berge, who died in 2012, and secondly, in 2014, Susan Tait, who survives him with two daughters and a son of the first marriage; a third daughter predeceased him.
Graeme Odgers, born March 10 1934, died May 8 2025
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