Shirine Khoury-Haq is the chief executive officer of the Co-op Group – the first female chief executive in its 180-year history and the first from an ethnic minority background.

Shirine was born in Beirut to a Palestinian father and a Turkish mother. Her father was a geophysicist who worked in the oil industry and his work took the family around the world. By the time Shirine was 12 she had lived on every continent except Antarctica, regularly having to adapt to very different schools and classmates.

She studied for a Bachelor of Commerce in accounting and economics at the Australian National University in Canberra, while taking on a number of jobs to pay her way. In 1996 she joined the McDonald’s Corporation as a finance and operations manager and then joined IBM as an associate partner.

In 2014 she was appointed chief operating officer for Lloyd’s of London and five years later she joined the Co-op as chief financial officer. She became the Group’s CEO in August 2022.

Shirine lives in Cheshire with her husband and two daughters.

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Shirine Khoury-Haq, businesswoman