Gloag, Ann (1942- )

Scottish entrepreneur and former nurse who co-founded Stagecoach, one of the UK's richest transport companies, with her brother Brian Souter, a former bus conductor. Reputed to miss her nursing vocation, Gloag has since taken a back seat in the company in which the family stake was estimated at almost £550 million by The Sunday Times Rich List in 2000.

Gloag teamed up with Souter to found Gloagtrotter in October 1980, using the £25,000 redundancy cheque of their father, who had himself been a bus driver for 40 years. Soon after the start of de-regulation of the UK bus industry, they bought two second-hand coaches and operated them between Dundee and London at nearly half the cost of their competitors and, fortuitously, at the same time as a rail strike. The company was renamed Stagecoach - Souter's alternative suggestion, Blunderbus, having been rejected - and it expanded rapidly. Stagecoach acquired parts of National Bus Co. in 1987 and Scottish Bus Group in 1991, and its aggressive growth became the subject of reports by the then Monopolies Commission. The company went public in 1993. In the late 1990s Stagecoach moved into rail transport, and expanded into the USA. However, following a series of board departures and a profits warning, Gloag stepped down as an executive director in May 2000 (remaining on the board as a non-executive director) to focus more on her charity work.

Gloag was born in Perth, Scotland, into a strict Protestant family. Educated at Perth High School, she became a trainee nurse at the Bridge of Earn Hospital. She worked her way up to ward sister at the Devonshire Royal Hospital by 1965, before returning to Perth four years later as a theatre sister. Gloag established a caravan hire business in 1976, which was to be the beginning of Stagecoach.

Stagecoach moved into rail transport as the operator of the South West Trains commuter franchise in 1996; paid £158 million for a controlling stake in Richard Branson's Virgin trains in 1998; and bought a stake in Road King, a Hong Kong toll operating company, in 1999. Also in that year, it bought Coach USA, a US bus group, for £773 million.

Gloag is a governor of the Barnado's orphanage in Kenya, a member of the board of the Princess Royal Trust for Carers, and of the Marie Curie Cancer Fund. In 1999 she made a £4 million donation to Mercy Ships, a Christian Danish-based charity, which fits out old ships to act as floating hospitals and relief centres in Africa.

Gloag has frequently appeared in top women executive listings, including Scottish Marketing Woman of the Year and the Veuve Cliquot UK Businesswoman of the Year