Enforcement Decision Panel (EDP)

David Ashbourne is a qualified solicitor with over thirty years’ experience in energy regulation. He is presently the Senior Regulatory Lawyer at a leading international utility which owns and operates water & electricity production, generation, transmission and distribution assets, and which owns oil & gas assets in a number of jurisdictions worldwide.

Prior to that David was a Legal Director at Ofgem for 18 years, and whilst focusing on network regulation and development was also legal advisor to GEMA for a substantial part of his tenure. He held senior legal positions in GB Energy Companies for some 15 years, beginning his career at British Gas, joining shortly after privatisation as a regional solicitor and then went on to lead the Transco Legal team after the restructuring to separate assets from the trading businesses. He assisted in the demerger of Centrica and the subsequent merger of the asset businesses with National Grid.

Andrew Ellam is a technology executive who also has 8 years’ experience in regulatory decision-making for the General Dental Council and the Phone Paid Services Authority. He is currently Vice President of Technology at climatetech start-up Climate X, forecasting the effects of climate change on properties worldwide and allowing financial institutions to be compliant with their regulatory climate risk assessment obligations to the Prudential Regulation Authority and its worldwide counterparts. He is also a member of the Code Adjudication Panel of the Phone Paid Services Authority, where he works as part of a Tribunal to ensure that enforcement matters concerning premium rate telephone billing, subscriptions and charges are determined in accordance with the Code, public law and better regulation principles.

Andrew has previously worked for Amazon (responsibilities included scaling and operational resilience for some of the world's largest streamed sports events and shows), Facebook (including implementing adtech integration with commercial partners and implementing controls designed to protect over 3bn customers from online harms), and most recently at Monzo Bank. At Monzo he was Director of Technical Program Management and Chief of Staff to the Chief Technology Officer, working on projects such as ensuring operational resilience across multiple cloud computing providers in compliance with the rules set out by the Prudential Regulation Authority and addressing UK banking technology regulation with regulators and trade bodies.

Earlier in his career he founded and worked for a range of start-up and scale-up businesses, as well as taking an MBA from London Business School in 2004 and gained general management experience as well as technology skills He has also served as a charity trustee and as a volunteer youth leader. Andrew is a micro-angel investor who has made seed investments in many start-up tech businesses, primarily based in the UK.

Megan Forbes was the Deputy Chief Executive and Director of Operations at the GPhC. Prior to that she was at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Megan’s responsibilities at the FCA have included leading the IT, finance, HR, communications and legal teams that support the FCA’s enforcement division. She has led multidisciplinary teams through significant programmes of change and has also managed teams of investigators tackling misconduct in financial services.

Prior to working for the FCA, Megan was Legal and Enforcement Partner at Ofgem, the regulator of the gas and electricity markets, where she led a major transformation of Ofgem’s approach to enforcement.

Peter Hinchliffe is a barrister with significant experience of making independent decisions in a legal or regulatory environment. He sits as a tribunal judge in the General Regulatory Chamber and in other jurisdictions. He is a member of the Regulatory Decision Panel of the Central Bank of Ireland and a Panel Chair for the Access Disputes Committee. He has held independent decision-making roles as Deputy Chair of the Regulatory Decisions Committee of the FCA, as a member of the Determinations Panel of The Pensions Regulator and in similar roles with HM Treasury and with regulators in the telecoms and legal services sectors.

Peter was Lead Ombudsman for insurance at the Financial Ombudsman Service until 2010 and has spoken and written extensively on consumer issues. He was chair of the Behavioural Insights Trustee Company and a member of the Financial Reporting Council's Case Management Committee until recently and is an experienced non-executive director and charity trustee. Prior to that he held senior management positions in the technology and charity sectors.

Dr Ulrike Hotopp is Director of Live Economics ltd a research based economic consultancy. She is a member of the CMA panel, The Code Change Committee of the operator of the non-household water market (MOSL) and the FCA’s and PSR’s Competition Decisions Committee. She is Reader for Economic Policy Analysis at the University of Kent. Until October 2018 Ulrike was Vice President at the UK Evaluation Society.

Ulrike has a PhD in Economics from the University of Sussex. She worked as a Civil Servant for the Government Economic Service between 2000 and 2016. In her last role she was Chief Economist and Director for Analysis at DEFRA. Other roles included Deputy Director for Strategic Analysis at the then Department for Energy and Climate Change.

Juliet Lazarus is a Panel Member at the Competition and Markets Authority and an independent member of the Provider Risk Committee at the Office for Students.

Prior to that, Juliet was General Counsel and Director of Competition at the Office of Rail and Road until 2021. She joined ORR in 2004 and was chief legal advisor to ORR’s board and a member of the senior executive team for 17 years. She became Director of Competition in 2013. Juliet started her career as a solicitor in private practice in the competition and regulation department at Linklaters.

Ali Nikpay is a partner at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher and head of its competition practice group in London. He has more than 20 years of EU and UK merger control, antitrust and litigation experience in both the private and public sectors. He has described in an editorial by the UK’s leading broadsheet, the Daily Telegraph, as “one of the world’s preeminent experts in European competition law”; by Chambers 2018 as “brilliant strategically and tactically, and is a great advocate”; and by Legal 500 2016 as “technically outstanding” and “very effective”. In 2017, The Financial Times named Ali among the Top 10 Innovators in Europe at the 2017 FT European Innovative Lawyer Awards, which recognized the “ten original legal thinkers in a fast moving world”. In 2010 he was identified as one of The Lawyer’s “Hot 100”.

During his time at the UK competition Authority, Ali held a number of important positions including Senior Director of its Cartels and Criminal Enforcement division, Senior Director for Merger Decisions and Senior Director of Policy International (in which capacity he interacted with senior officials at agencies in the US, the EU, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada etc). He was also a member of the authority’s highest decision-making organ, its Executive Committee.

He has also served on the Confederation of British Industry’s Competition Panel and on several occasions appeared before the House of Lords Select Committee on the European Union.

He is co-editor of “Faull & Nikpay: The EU Law of Competition,” which was described by European Competition Law Review as “… the best single volume work dealing with EU competition law that is available. He serves on the editorial boards of the following journals: “European Competition Law”, “World Competition”, “Antitrust Enforcement Review” and “Competition Law International”. Ali is a Visiting Lecturer at University of Oxford and was a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). In 2012, he authored an article “UK cartel enforcement: past, present, future“, which was nominated by the Global Competition Review for an award.