Sir Peter John Wood CBE (born 6 November 1946, in Surrey) is an English entrepreneur, most notable as the founder of the Direct Line and esure insurance companies.
[12] The subsequent attention and notoriety his pay attracted—Labour Party MP and then-shadow Trade Secretary Robin Cook called his bonus "obscene"[1][13]—was a source of embarrassment both to Wood himself and the Royal Bank, which attempted to buy its way out of its contractual obligations with a one-off £24 million payment in 1994, taking his total income that year to £42 million.
[12][14] Wood himself claims that he personally requested an end to the deal after receiving a letter bomb at the Direct Line offices which injured a member of staff.
[14][15][16] He left Direct Line in 1997,[5] but continued to work with the Royal Bank in other areas, including Privilege, an insurance company specialising in lower-risk customers which had been founded in 1996.
[21] esure used the same business model as Direct Line and targeted the same customer base, establishing a foothold in the market before following with a subsidiary (First Alternative) in 2003 for drivers of higher premium vehicles.
[37] He was appointed a director of the Princess Royal Trust for Carers in 1994 and served for three years until he moved to found The Croydon Colorectal Cancer Charity with Mr Ian Swift, Consultant Surgeon at Mayday Hospital, Surrey.
[38] Wood is the biggest donor to prostate cancer research at UCL Hospital in London, where he has funded the latest radiology equipment and sponsors a leading professor.