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Roger Thomas was educated in Wales and at The Leys School, Cambridge. In 1968, after four years study at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of London University, he obtained an Honours Degree in Turkish.
Mr. Thomas joined the Foreign Office in 1968 and first spent three years in London dealing with international maritime law and continental shelf delimitation of all British territories overseas. In 1971, he was posted to the Chancery (the political section) at the British Embassy in Cairo where he dealt with internal and economic affairs of Egypt (and the Yom Kippur War of October 1973). Between 1974 and 1978 he served at the British Mission to the EC in Brussels and was spokesman for environmental legislation (mainly concerning permissible levels of industrial discharges to air and water). There followed a three-year term in Turkey as HM Consul, a politically sensitive post after the Timothy Davy case and Midnight Express.
In 1982 Mr. Thomas was posted back to London where he served in the legal affairs division of European Communities Department with responsibility for parliamentary scrutiny of EC legislation. In 1986 he moved to Germany, first as Commercial Consul in Frankfurt and later as Consul-General in Stuttgart. This brought many years of contact with the banking sector (Deutsche, Dresdner and Commerz Banks in particular) and with German industry (Bosch, Daimler, Porsche, etc).
In 1993 Mr. Thomas returned to the Foreign Office in London where he headed a team of analysts on Iraqi WMD. He was in charge of all British personnel taking part in UNSCOM weapons inspections in Iraq.
From August 1997 to October 2000, Mr. Thomas served as British Ambassador at Baku, Azerbaijan. He was awarded the CMG (Companion of the order of St Michael and St George) in 2000. After leaving Baku, he was seconded to the Digital Business Division of BP for six months.
Mr. Thomas’s final diplomatic post was as Consul-General in San Francisco where he was custodian of British commercial interests in California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana and Alaska.
Mr. Thomas speaks German, French, Turkish and Azerbaijani and will have special responsibilities to the board on matters of governmental relations. | 