Who is Richard Sharp and why is he quitting the BBC?

theguardian.com:

The BBC chair, Richard Sharp, has resigned after being found to have breached public appointment rules for failing to declare a connection to a secret £800,000 loan for the former prime minister Boris Johnson.

While this breach of the rules does not necessarily invalidate his appointment to the role, Sharp said his position was no longer tenable and called it a “distraction from the corporation’s good work”.

Sharp’s decision to resign comes as the BBC continues to face suggestions that it has become too close to the Conservative government after years of sustained political pressure and threats to its funding.

Sharp, 67, previously worked as a Goldman Sachs banker and is a former Conservative party donor. He was appointed chair of the BBC in early 2021.

The part-time position involves overseeing the BBC’s operations and managing relationships with the government. Sharp said he would give his £160,000 BBC salary to charity, after making an estimated £200m fortune in banking.

Regarded as a canny and smooth operator, and with powerful friends in Downing Street, Sharp was a former economic adviser to Johnson when he was mayor of London and the boss of the current prime minister, Rishi Sunak, when he was a junior banker at Goldman Sachs in the early 2000s. In 2020, Sharp took a position as an adviser to Sunak, who was then the chancellor.

Sharp, who read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, was chair of the Royal Academy for seven years, a director of the Olympic legacy board and has held directorships including at the International Rescue Committee. He sat on the Bank of England’s financial policy committee from 2013 to 2019 and is a former member of the board of the Centre for Policy Studies, the thinktank set up by