Phil Bentley

Phillip Keague Bentley was born on 14 January 1959 in Bradford, England. He was educated at Woodhouse Grove School, took a master's degree at Pembroke College, Oxford, and earned an MBA from INSEAD in Fontainebleau. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, having trained as a management accountant after joining BP's graduate scheme in 1982, where he worked internationally in China (1983–85), Egypt and the US before returning to the UK as head of capital markets.

Bentley built a long FTSE-level executive career. He joined Grand Metropolitan in 1995 (which merged to form Diageo in 1997), then spent 2000–2013 at Centrica plc, serving as Group Finance Director (2000–2007), Managing Director for Europe (2004–2007) and Managing Director of British Gas (2007–2013). He was subsequently Group Chief Executive of Cable & Wireless Communications plc from January 2014 until its £5.3bn sale to Liberty Global in May 2016. Alongside these roles he held non-executive directorships at Kingfisher plc (2002–2010, audit committee chair) and IMI plc (from 2012).

Since 13 December 2016 he has been CEO of Mitie Group plc, the UK's largest facilities-management company, succeeding Ruby McGregor-Smith. His tenure is best known for the 2020 acquisition of Interserve's facilities-management business, which roughly doubled Mitie's size and made it the sector leader. In June 2026 the company announced that Bentley would step down as CEO in March 2027. He is publicly associated with a "low ego, high impact" hiring philosophy and an "inverted triangle" org-chart model that places customer-facing staff at the top.

As an investor, Bentley operates as an individual strategic angel rather than through a fund. His disclosed angel activity is a strategic investment in Marco Financial, a Miami-based, Latin America–focused trade-finance startup, in its 2021 seed round.

• Invests personally as a strategic angel, not via a dedicated fund or firm.
• Disclosed activity is at the seed stage (Marco Financial, 2021).
• Appears to back founders where his operating background — finance, energy/utilities retail, telecoms and large-scale B2B services — adds value; Marco's fintech/trade-finance model fits a finance-led thesis.
• Brings value beyond capital as a "strategic" backer: decades of FTSE-100 CEO/CFO experience in scaling operations, financial discipline and customer operations.
• His stated leadership lens ("take care of your people who are closest to the customer"; CEOs exist "to make decisions… not to be a safe pair of hands") signals a preference for decisive, customer-obsessed operators.