Yves Bonavero

Yves Bonavero was born and educated in Paris. He holds a First-Class Honours degree in Philosophy and German, as well as an MA, from Oxford University. Yves started his business career with Man Group and became CEO in 1987.

In 1996, Yves founded in Poland Dom Development, listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange since 2006, which currently develops over 4,000 homes a year, and Europa Park, the country’s premier logistics and distribution centre. Yves is the chairman of Woodsford Consulting Ltd, which he founded in 1996. In 2010, he founded Woodsford Group Ltd which holds corporations to account for ESG breaches.

In 1990, together with his wife Anne, he established the A B Charitable Trust to promote human dignity and defend the human rights of marginalised and excluded people. The charity, which Yves chaired for thirty-three years, ranks among the UK’s top 50 grantmaking foundations and in 2015 endowed the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at Oxford University.

Yves’s first novel, Something in the Sea, was published by Bloomsbury in 2006; his second, The Nuremberg Enigma, followed in 2016.

In September 2023, Yves was awarded by the Open University the honorary degree of Doctor of the University in recognition of his Public Services and the exceptional contribution he made to championing human dignity.