One of the City's best-known entrepreneurs resigned all his directorships yesterday - to move to a desert island, where he plans to become a writer.

David Norwood, a former chief executive of the stockbrokers Evolution and Beeson Gregory, resigned from the boards of a number of companies, including Oxford Advanced Surfaces, ORA Capital, Oxeco and Plus-listed Green Chemicals. He has also given up his role as special projects director at IP Group, the intellectual property commercialisation company, which he started eight years ago and floated on AIM in 2003. Shares of all five companies fell after the news was released.

A comprehensive schoolboy from Farnworth, near Bolton, who became an International Grandmaster in chess before his 21st birthday, Mr Norwood took a history degree at Keble College, Oxford, and then joined Banker's Trust as a currency trader, before working for the stockbrokers Duncan Lawrie and Williams de Broë. The former England chess captain became chief executive of Beeson Gregory, the broker, before stepping down to concentrate on its portfolio of investments, starting IP2IPO in 2001.

That business was inspired by the failure by Britain's universities to exploit their intellectual property. Within four years, it had backed more than 20 university spin-off companies and has brought Mr Norwood an estimated £10 million fortune.

At the end of the year, Mr Norwood, who used to keep a pet rabbit in his office, will move to Ludder's Quarter, a remote island in the northern Bahamas, where he plans to write a book. He told The Times: “I turned 40 in October and it hit me that I'd been doing this for 16 years, so decided to do something completely different. The book is already in my head - it will be called Plan B.”

Mr Norwood, who is single, insisted that he remained committed to all his companies and would not be selling shares in any of them. He said that his departure was not connected to the present state of investment markets.

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