UK entrepreneur in Qatar biomedical venture

OFFICIAL VISIT: British prime minister Gordon Brown (r) visited the Qatar Science and Technology Park on his Gulf visit earlier this month. (Getty Images)

British scientist and entrepreneur Professor Sir Christopher Evans is planning to launch a business venture in Qatar within the next six months for the development and sale of biomedical products, he revealed on Tuesday.

The multi-millionaire, an adviser to British prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and Labour party donor, who has built science companies worth over £3 billion, plans to locate a headquarters of Excalibur Group Holdings Limited, a London-based company of which he is chairman, in the Qatar Science and Technology Park, he told Arabian Business on the sidelines of BioQatar Symposium 2008, a biomedical conference in Doha.

He has been meeting with senior officials from the park and the Qatar Foundation, a non-profit organisation set up by the government to improve the lives of Qataris.

Evans said the venture would need hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and said he expected the bulk of the investment for the business to come from within Qatar.

He said he would be putting together a proposal over the next week detailing how Excalibur could move its 20-strong team of 20 scientists, private equity experts, corporate financial practitioners and venture capitalists to the country to launch the enterprise initally.

"We have built companies from nothing up to billions of dollars, we've financed them, floated them around the world and closed transactions," he said.

"We know how to build, extract value and put companies together, which I think is possibly a missing component here in Qatar.

"I could also bring other investors but it depends on what Qatar wants but to get things aligned to Qatar's own strategic vision it should largely be built by their own money.

"Our model is that within two years of investment you are launching new medical products and building real medical businesses.

"There is a Middle Eastern market peculiar to itself with its own demographics of diabetes, obesity and cancer."

He said he expected the first one or two business transactions to be completed in the second half of 2009 and over the first two years he would look to recruit native Qataris.

Also on the sidelines, Dr Abdelali Haoudi, vice president, research, of Qatar Foundation, which organised the event in a bid to attract biotechnology ventures to the country to build its medical sector, said it was evaluating business proposals from biomedical companies wanting to expand to Qatar, but wouldn’t give further details.

He said: "We have to look more carefully at their proposals and if they match our needs we will move forward."

Dr Eulian Roberts, managing director, Qatar Science and Technology Park, said: "Attracting the venture capital investment in the life science industry in the face of competition from retail, real estate and other opportunities that exist will be a significant challenge."

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