Judge and friend she'd rather forget

SHE IS one of the most powerful women in the City, a pillar of the social establishment and the wife of multi-millionaire businessman Sir Paul Judge. Since moving to Britain from America ten years ago, she has built a portfolio of top positions in the worlds of business and regulation that would put the most energetic multi-tasking pluralist to shame.

She is also a trustee of the Royal Academy of Arts and helped to organise its 2002 Jubilee ball, where the guest of honour was Prince Charles.

In that spectacular rise, Barbara Thomas, or Lady Judge as she is now known, has put far behind her a connection to one of America's most notorious fraudsters, Charles Keating, who served four-and-a-half years in prison for his role in the savings and loans scandal that rocked America in the Eighties.

Thomas, 57, recently appointed chairwoman of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, sits on the boards of eight listed companies, including Friends Provident. Shareholders were not told that she worked as a lawyer for Keating's group and knew him well.

Not only did she represent him in court, but it emerged in government investigations into the savings and loan scandal that she had a £140,000 loan from Lincoln Savings & Loan, the business run by Keating's American Continental Corporation.

In 1988, she offered a character reference on Keating to the Securities & Exchange Commission, the financial watchdog investigating his affairs.

Lincoln had collapsed with losses of billions of dollars and Keating was charged with duping customers into buying worthless junk bonds. And during a 1989 hearing by the House of Representatives Banking Committee, it was claimed that she had asked a friend for privileged information from a savings and loan investigation into Lincoln at a time when she had been approached by Keating to join the board of American Continental.

'A decent person'

THOMAS says now: 'I did give a character reference for Charles Keating. I said I considered him a decent person because on a personal level that was my experience of him. I asked Shannon Fairbanks [the savings and loan official] in passing when she was a guest in my home in Hong Kong if she had any idea whether the investigation into Keating would ever end, but I had no idea I was asking anything sensitive.'

If Fairbanks had given the information, it would have been unauthorised and therefore illegal. But there is no suggestion that Thomas intended any wrongdoing.

Thomas was later named in lawsuits involving the Lincoln collapse because she was a lawyer for Keating and had been named in the congressional investigation. She paid £51,000 in an out-of-court settlement.

That, she now says, was a pragmatic decision taken because 'I was one of a large number of people named in class action lawsuits at the time of the savings and loans business. There was an opportunity to settle without liability and I decided to do that rather than face higher and higher costs and because the case could have gone on for a long time.'

Many of the companies on whose boards she now sits say they were aware of her involvement in the company linked to the meltdown that robbed millions of Americans of their savings.

Nigel Ellis of Quintain Estates, for example, says: 'We knew about Keating. Our view was that Barbara had simply been caught up in a legal action in America where these things happen. We spoke to our advisers Cazenove and there was no problem.'

But none of these firms chose to share the information about Thomas's past connection with Lincoln with shareholders before asking them to vote in support of her appointment as a director, even though in some cases, such as at FTSE 100 insurer Friends Provident, it might have been of interest to investors.

Friends Provident said: 'We were aware of Keating and it is not an issue for us. Thomas was appointed after we used independent research consultants. She is a highly valued non-executive director.'

Thomas, who lives with her husband of two years in a luxury apartment overlooking the Thames in central London, rather unusually still styles herself 'The Honourable' - a title given to her when, at 34, she was appointed the youngest commissioner of the Securities & Exchange Commission.

Powerful networker

SHE stepped down after three years and an SEC spokesman commented that the use of the title at all, but particularly after someone had left the organisation, was 'very unusual'.

Thomas explains: ' Presidential appointees [such as ambassadors] are allowed to use the term honourable. I used it in the UK because some of the companies wanted me to use it.'

Charming, immaculately coiffeured and a powerful networker, Thomas has always been a high-flier. Born Barbara Singer in the American Midwest, she went to the University of Pennsylvania and New York University Law School. She became, when she moved to Hong Kong in 1983, the first woman director of merchant bank Samuel Montagu.

She then joined Bankers Trust - it was at this time that she became caught up in the savings and loan scandal - but left there in 1990.

Thomas arrived in Britain three years later, with her then husband, an American lawyer Allen Thomas, to become legal director of Rupert Murdoch's News International, a position she had been alerted to by legal contacts. She then left to head a management buy-in at two food groups and has never looked back.

In addition to her quoted company directorships, Thomas - whose 21-year-old son is studying at university in America and who says her working day starts at 5.30am - has considerable involvement with charities and is deputy chairman of the accountancy regulator, the Financial Reporting Council.

But despite such a huge list of commitments, she says: 'I have an excellent attendance record and try to always be prepared and take my responsibilities as a non-executive very seriously. I think it is particularly important if you are a woman to try and do a good job.'