Heavy-hitting fund manager Robert Mitchell, known for his role at the AIM Venture Capital Trust and other investment vehicles, is joining the panel governing strategy for OFEX, the private share market run by AIM-quoted PLUS Markets. Robert Tyerman reports.

Mitchell, who together with fellow fund manager Bill Brown runs money at their new Blue Hone concern for the merged ISIS/F&C investment group, joins the OFEX Panel at a time of momentous change. Several institutions, including Artemis, Rathbones, Invesco and Singer & Friedlander, have welcomed new market rules requiring greater transparency about companies and directors as well as laying down conditions for shell companies to float on OFEX.

Enthusiasts for the new regime at OFEX and Simon Brickles, chief executive officer of PLUS Markets, see these changes as a key milestone for bringing hitherto wary institutions into OFEX. They and their buying power could make OFEX the first port of call for young companies seeking eventual flotation on AIM or a full listing on the London Stock Exchange.

On this view, as AIM itself grows in size and recognition, in the process drawing in resource and other companies from abroad, it will increasingly leave the field wide open for the smaller of the companies it has previously attracted to be taken on by a beefed-up OFEX. With several institutions changing their own rules to allow them to back OFEX companies, 'the next 12 months will be crucial', says entrepreneur John French, who has taken several companies to AIM via OFEX and recently floated condom maker Sexual Health Group on the private market.

It is understood that Mitchell himself made the first move in suggesting a place on the OFEX Panel might be appropriate. These developments could also provide a fillip for PLUS Markets, whose chairman Stephen Hazell-Smith the other day spent more than £40,000 buying a 0.8 per cent holding at 6.38p.