Xodus Group has made two senior appointments to support its strategy for further international growth.

Nigel Ross joins as business development director from Wood Group GTS where he was global key account director. Maggie Leitch has been appointed global director for technical safety and risk (TSR) and joins from PSN where she was global head of safety & environmental engineering, managing a team she grew from 12 to 70.

Nigel brings more than 30 years' international industry experience and has helped to develop oil and gas businesses in key energy regions including West Africa, Middle East, the Caspian and Russia. He will sit on the board of the firm's XMOS joint venture in Nigeria and will help to expand the multi-disciplined global team.

A Russian speaker, Nigel is determined that his industry experience and contacts will be instrumental to Xodus achieving its bold growth targets in the coming years. He said, "Xodus is an ambitious, top flight consultancy on the cusp of further international expansion and I'm very keen to apply my global experience and structured business development and market entry skills to help the company achieve its growth target of 1,000 employees by 2015."

Nigel joins Xodus after 18 months at Wood Group where he worked as Global Key Account Director. Prior to this he worked at Petrotechnics Ltd as a business development manager overseeing a number of high-profile projects in the Middle East, West Africa and Brunei. Previously, Nigel worked in Shell International, SDPC Nigeria and Shell UK fronting up and downstream capital projects after starting his career with Scottish Enterprise where he spent 11 years developing export links with the former Soviet Union, on behalf of Scottish-based businesses.

Maggie Leitch joins Xodus with an extensive background within safety, loss prevention and risk management, boasting 22 years' industry experience.

Maggie worked at PSN as chief of safety and environmental engineering for over eight years. While there she was responsible for developing best practice and global policies for safety and environmental engineering groups, developing strategic plans for international growth and promoting personnel and industry development.

Further to this, Maggie set up her own internal consultancy which at peak boasted 22 technical specialists attracting its own external international clients. She previously worked at Atkins Process as the principal safety engineer building upon her past expertise at Total Fina Elf Exploration UK where Maggie spent the bulk of her early career.

Between 1989 and 2002 she performed various roles at TFEE UK ranging from process engineer to her peak position as the head of safety engineering and subsequently the senior project engineer on the £30 million Alwyn Systems Upgrade Project.

She said, "I'm looking forward to the challenge ahead and my aspiration is to help Xodus excel in the field of technical safety and risk. I want Xodus to be both the employer of choice for technical safety, value systems, risk and reliability engineers and the consultant of choice for clients."

Colin Manson, CEO of Xodus Group welcomed the duo to the team. He said, "We are very pleased to be appointing two high-caliber industry specialists and these new positions will help to greatly strengthen our management team as we continue to expand in the UK and new markets overseas."

Tags: Xodus Group