2010 Judges to be announced

Listed below is the judging panel from 2009

Emma Kane – Redleaf Communications Emma Kane is the Founder and Chief Executive of Redleaf Communications, the specialist media and investor relations agency she founded in January 2000. She has over 20 years' experience, both in-house and within consultancies, working for small to mid cap companies and major financial institutions. At the heart of the Agency’s success are its core values: perceptive, creative, meticulous, dependable and proactive. Redleaf advises more than 90 companies across a range of sectors building relationships and facilitating dialogue between its clients and the media and investment communities.
Philipp Prince – BDO Stoy Hayward LLP Philipp is a transaction services partner in the London corporate finance team. Over the last 10 years he has advised on many IPOs and other capital markets transactions, including US and international offerings and public takeovers under the City Code. Philipp also has extensive experience of acquisition due diligence for corporate buyers in the UK and Europe. After qualifying with the firm Philipp spent two years in the Paris office before joining corporate finance and becoming a partner in 2002. He sits on the firm’s technical committee and is responsible for corporate finance risk management As a senior member of the Capital Markets team, Philipp has acted as reporting accountant for UK companies and international businesses across Europe, in the US and in emerging markets including Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine.
Francesca Raleigh – Numis Securities Francesca Raleigh is a support services sector specialist with over 20 years experience as an equities analyst. She has won a number of awards andwas voted AIM analyst of the Year at the 2008 Growth Company Awards. As for Numis Securities, a leading UK equities stockbroker with a corporate client list of over 100 plcs, it has a strong presence in the UK small/mid cap equities market and performed strongly in the 2008 Thomson Extel broker survey (for UK plcs with market capitalisations up to £1 billion)where it was voted No.2 Brokerage firm, no. 3 Research firm, no.2 for Trading/Execution, no.3 for Sales and no.3 for Corporate Access.
Nigel Boardman – Slaughter & May Nigel has been a partner at Slaughter and May, where he has worked across a range of industries, since 1982. His broad practice includes domestic and international corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions (including private acquisitions and disposals and public takeovers), joint ventures, IPOs, demergers, private equity, issues of compliance and corporate governance and insolvency, as well as restructurings and investigations. Nigel has a very active pro bono practice. He is Vice President of international charity ‘Save the Children' and is a member of the Steering Committee for 'Seeing is Believing', a charity dedicated to curable blindness. He has been honoured with the Chambers Directory's lifetime achievement award and is also listed as a leading individual for M&A in The Legal 500, 2008.
Richard Power – Octopus Investments Octopus Investments’ Richard Power is a fund manager with 11 years’ experience managing UK smaller company funds, most recently at Close Brothers. Prior to that, Richard spent five years at Duncan Lawrie Ltd. Whilst Richard was managing the Duncan Lawrie Smaller Companies Fund, it won a number of awards including the best performing UK smaller companies fund over the one, three and five years ending 31st December 1999. Richard graduated from Exeter University with a BA (Hons) in Economic and Political Development.
Sam Smith – Finncap Sam qualified as a chartered accountant with KPMG in 1998. Soon after qualification she joined J. M. Finn & Co. Ltd. to help develop the firm’s corporate finance division. She has worked on over 60 transactions, mostly IPO’s and secondary fund raisings. Sam is also a director of J. M. Finn & Co. Ltd.
Melanie Wadsworth – Faegre & Benson LLP Melanie Wadsworth is a partner in the corporate group of Faegre & Benson LLP, an international law firm. She has extensive experience of advising on a wide range of quoted company transactions, including flotations, fundraisings, reverse takeovers and recommended offers, and has worked with public companies across a broad range of industry sectors and jurisdictions including China, the US and Australia. Melanie regularly advises directors on their responsibilities as officers of companies whose shares are publicly traded and sits on the Corporate Governance Committee of the Quoted Companies Alliance, which represents the interests of smaller quoted companies in the UK. She the author of the chapter on Corporate Governance in the AIM Practitioners’ Guide and is a regular commentator on issues facing AIM and other smaller quoted companies.
Mark Wignall – CEO of Matrix Private Equity Partners Mark is Chief Executive of Matrix Private Equity Partners, a Fund Manager that focuses on investing in established and growing privately owned businesses. He has been a private equity investor for over 20 years, starting his career with GLE Development Capital, where he also founded a factoring and invoice discounting company, Independent Growth Finance. Matrix has £120 million of funds under management and is one of the UK's leading VCT Managers, specialising in backing management buy outs of companies with annual turnovers of £10 - 30 million. Matrix has won a number of industry awards for VCT Manager of the Year.
Richard Feigen – Seymour Pierce Richard Feigen is the Managing Director of Seymour Pierce and is responsible for all of Seymour Pierce's activities encompassing investment banking, stockbroking and corporate finance. He started working in the City in 1986, initially as a private client broker and then moved into corporate finance. He has been with Seymour Pierce since 1998 and became the Managing Director in 1999; he co-led the Alchemy funded MBO in 2003. He works principally in corporate finance and has acted on numerous transactions.
Tom Shaw – Speechly Bircham LLP Tom specialises in corporate and commercial law and has over 20 years experience dealing with advisory and transactional work for public and private businesses including mergers, acquisitions and securities issues. He is head of the quoted companies group within Speechly Bircham’s corporate practice and leads its Indian practice group. His role includes advising on IPOs and secondary share issues on AIM, often to provide finance for acquisitions, and advising on private company/business acquisitions and disposals. Tom, a member of the Legal Committee of the Quoted Companies Alliance (QCA), is recognised as a legal expert for Corporate and M&A by Legal Experts 2009.
Nick Hasell at The Times Nick Hasell is editor of Tempus, The Times’s daily investment column – a position he has held since May 2007. He has worked at The Times since 1999, previously as banking correspondent and stockmarket editor. Mr Hasell has been a journalist for 19 years, having begun his career at Management Today as a graduate in 1990. He previously worked for Financial News, which he joined at launch in 1996.
Andy Stewart of Cenkos Securities Cenkos’ founder shareholder and CEO, Andy Stewart has more than 30 years’ experience in the UK securities industry, having co-founded Collins Stewart in 1991 and subsequently listed the company on the London Stock Exchange with a initial market capitalisation of £326 million. He began his career as a stockbroker in 1969 with Simon & Coates, where be became a senior partner. Following its acquisition by Chase Manhattan Bank, he became chief executive of Chase Manhattan Securities until the launch of Collins Stewart.
Leslie Koht Copeland – Vitesse Media Leslie is the Chief Operating Officer of Vitesse Media and has worked in the media sector for over 12 years in an array of roles, including journalist, analyst, editor and executive director. He joined Vitesse in 1997 as a journalist on Growth Company Investor, ascending to the role of editorial director of Vitesse Media Plc by 2000, with responsibility for the delivery of Vitesse’s products across all platforms – online, events and print. Since mid-2006 Vitesse Media has doubled in size, and Leslie has played a significant part in the integration of What Investment (purchased by the company in December 2006) and Information Age (purchased in December 2007). He was appointed to the role of chief operating officer in March 2008.
James Crux – Growth Company Investor James is the editor of Growth Company Investor magazine and GrowthCompany.co.uk. He covers a wide range of small cap companies ion both AIM and the Full List and has been with the Vitesse Media team for nine years.