Bijan Khezri

Business — 01 May 2011

Bijan Khezri, is the Co-Founder & Partner of Saphire Finance LLP. After studying law at the University of Bonn and graduating from the Institut de Hautes Etudes Internationales (University of Geneva), Bijan Khezri, a German national, built the technology practice within the Equity Capital Markets Group of Paribas in London. Since 1998 Mr. Khezri has invested as Chairman, Chief Executive and non-executive Director in innovation-centric companies, both publicly traded and private, in the UK, the US and Germany.

For more than six years he was a key investor and served as a member of the Supervisory Board of Jetter AG, a leader in real-time industrial automation solutions and listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. As board director and investor of VPNet Technologies, a Silicon Valley based pioneer of advanced telecommunications technologies, he was instrumental to its takeover by Avaya Inc (NYSE-listed). As Chief Executive, he led the restructuring of FTSE-100 technology conglomerate Baltimore Technologies plc.

Mr. Khezri is an active private equity investor across a range of sectors with growth, restructuring and consolidation potential. In 2006 he co-founded Enovation Resources, a gas & oil exploration and production company (www.enovationresources.com). In 2008, he co-founded Advanced Games Lab Limited (Alderney), the operator of a social networking based gaming platform (www.yazino.com) and serves as the Executive Chairman of its holding company, Yazino Group AG (Switzerland). Mr. Khezri is Chairman of Stan James Plc, one of Europe’s leading sports bookmakers (www.stanjames.com).

Bijan Khezri is the author of ‘Generation Dubai: Exit, Voice and Loyalty’ (www.generationdubai.com). Mr. Khezri is actively dedicated to emerging contemporary art through the Khezri Collection as well as his previous leadership of the Artist Pension Trust (www.artistpensiontrust.org).