Michael Noel-Clarke has more than forty years of experience of Iran.  He speaks, reads and writes fluent Persian. He first visited the country in 1960, when he was studying Persian and Arabic at Oxford University.  He later lived in Iran for a year, when he studied Persian and taught English at the University of Isfahan.  He was First Secretary (Political) in the British Embassy in Tehran from 1970 until 1974 and between postings in Arab countries and Europe he spent the mid-1980s studying post-revolutionary Iran in London on behalf of the Foreign Office.  From 1994 until 1996, he wrote a regular review of political and economic developments in Iran for commercial clients on behalf of MEC International.  He is now a London lawyer, he retains a keen interest in Iran and has a number of Iranian clients. 

Senior Consultant 

Since 1998, Rawdon O’Connor is the Director of “En Plus”, a freelance translator and consultant for technical and IT related English, in France. In the 1980’s he trained as a Class 1 Arabic interpreter in the Army where he served with the British Force in Lebanon and the Joint Military Intelligence Staffs in Oman, gaining an Institute of Linguists diploma along the way. After his MA course with Tim Niblock, he went on to GCHQ, initially with the Joint Technical Language Service. Later, on promotion and detachment to the MoD in Cyprus, he served as senior Arabic adviser. He returned to GCHQ in 1996 as a technical project sponsor responsible for satisfying diverse customer IT and communications requirements.

He speaks several languages including Arabic and French.

Senior Consultant

Former British Ambassador to Venezuela and, concurrently, to Dominican Republic (1993-97); Ambassador to Angola and, concurrently, to Sao Tome and Principe (1990-93); High Commissioner to Swaziland (1987-90). Previously served as Counsellor (Economic) and Director of Trade Promotion at Madrid (1982-87); Counsellor (Political) at Brasilia (1979-82); as Chargé d’Affaires opened  the British Embassy at Luanda, (1978); Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), London, as a member of the Anglo-American Rhodesia Negotiating Team (1976-77); First Secretary Montevideo (1971-76); Assistant Director-General Canning House, London, (1971); First Secretary Americas Department FCO (1968-70); Second Secretary, Lusaka (1965-67). Joined Foreign Office 1965.

1997 to present: adviser to ChevronTexaco, De La Rue plc, and other companies.

Senior Consultant

Dr. Hermann Franssen is the President of International Energy Associates Inc of Chevy Chase, Maryland since 1996. The group provides energy economic analysis of global oil markets; conducts political risk assessments; assists companies in establishing relationships with NOC’s and governments in the Middle East; and, conducts private sector – government workshops on a variety of oil industry issues. Dr. Franssen is a Director of Petroleum Economics Ltd (PEL) of London, an internationally well known energy consulting company with considerable expertise in such areas as price formation, competitive positioning, economic and political geography, project evaluation, market regulation, and current and emerging technologies.

Prior to establishing IEA Inc., Dr. Franssen was Senior Economic Advisor of H.E. the Minister of Petroleum and Minerals of the Sultanate of Oman (1985-1996), advising the Minister on crude oil marketing, international oil policy, foreign investments in the oil and gas sectors. Originated with Mexico the formation of IPEC (Independent Petroleum Exporting Countries), an informal group of 14 oil exporting countries and provinces. Acted as principal liaison of the Ministry of Petroleum with the OPEC Secretariat as well as individual oil exporting and oil consuming countries.

From 1980-1985, Dr. Franssen was Chief Economist of the IEA and in this capacity was responsible for energy economic analysis of the IEA and for the first major IEA World Energy Outlook in 1983. Between 1978 and 1980, Dr. Franssen had similar responsibilities in the US Department of Energy as Director of the Office of International Market Analysis.

Dr. Franssen was born in The Netherlands where he attended the University of Amsterdam. He received a BA from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota and an

MA, MALD and PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Mass. He serves as a senior advisor and Board member of  a number of  US and European companies and is a Senior Associate with CSIS in Washington, DC.

Senior Consultant

Julian Halliburton graduated in November 1997 from the school of Oriental and African Studies, London, with a Masters degree in the International Politics of Asia and Africa, specialising in the international and domestic politics of the Middle East. While at SOAS, he studied Hebrew and Arabic, and completed his undergraduate degree in Comparative Religion. Julian works with the MEC Publications Group where he participates in political risk studies and the Business Information Division, where he is prepares country reports on Gulf states.

Senior Consultant

His career in the Diplomatic Service, during which he was posted to Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland, and Egypt, (and which also included secondments to the Ministry of Defence and the Cabinet Office), concluded with his appointment to Abu Dhabi in 1994 as HM Ambassador. He took early retirement in 1998 to join Flemings as a Director in their Middle East Corporate Finance Department. He left when Chase took over Flemings in May 2000, and is now engaged in half-a-dozen different business interests in the Middle East, concentrating on internet services, defence technology, investment opportunities, and the construction and automotive industries. He is a Director of the I & M Galadari Group (developers of the main residential and retail area of Dubailand), Regional

Representative of Marsh Kroll (risk analysts and insurance brokers), Director of the Links Group (advisors on business start-ups) and an Advisor to Thames Water. Anthony Harris, who was educated at Exeter College Oxford, is married with four children. He speaks Arabic and French. His sports are shooting (HM The Queen’s Prize, Bisley 1964), climbing, skiing, diving and swimming. His chief other interests are the history of the neolithic and Roman periods, and oriental carpets.

Senior Consultant

Victor Henderson began working with MEC in 2001, following his retirement from the British Diplomatic Service at the beginning of that year. His last job was as Ambassador in Yemen (1997-2001). During 35 years in the Service he also served in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Venezuela, the Occupied Territories and Finland. His jobs in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London included dealing with Mexico and Central America, the Cyprus problem, relations between Greece and Turkey, and trade promotion policy. Vic speaks Spanish and Arabic, understands spoken French, and reads Finnish and Portuguese.

Senior Consultant

Chris Holden is a former diplomat and Arabist who joined MEC International Ltd in March 2002 as a senior consultant working within the investigations, banking, finance, government and other sectors with particular reference to business development in Europe, the Gulf, Levant, Central Asia and countries of the Eastern Mediterranean including Turkey, Greece and Cyprus, as well as in Eastern Europe and the USA. He is a specialist on Iraq and Jordan where he has a wide range of senior contacts in the political and business sectors.

Chris Holden retired from the British Diplomatic Service in 1998. During his career in the Foreign Office he studied Arabic and served in Lebanon, Libya, Kenya, Egypt and Jordan.  In Kenya he acted as the UK’s Deputy Permanent Representative to two UN organisations.  In 1997 he was seconded to the UK Immigration Service to prepare a plan of action to improve the performance of the Service in curbing illegal immigration into the UK. Prior to joining the Diplomatic Service he was a management trainee with Rio Tinto Zinc after graduating from Birmingham University with a BSc in Mechanical Engineering and a BCom in Economics.  He speaks Arabic and French.

Senior Consultant

Myron Humeniuk is president of Ecosystematics, a consulting firm based in Toronto, Canada and has over 30 years of global experience in the environmental management discipline.

His areas of expertise encompass environmental impact assessment, institutional strengthening / capacity building of government environmental agencies, women-in-development studies, environmental policy formulation as well as infrastructure planning for energy, water and transportation projects.

Clients have included international agencies such as the United Nations, the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Canadian International Development Agency, private corporate clients, as well as governments in Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Canada, China, France, Greece, India, Mexico, Montserrat, Pakistan, Panama, the United Kingdom and the United States.

From 1995 to 1998 Mr. Humeniuk served as a member of the Environmental Assessment Board of the Ontario Ministry of Environment and Energy where he sat in judgment upon applications for industrial decommissioning and waste disposal site operations.

Mr. Humeniuk has been associated with MEC as a senior consultant since 1991 and in 2001 was appointed manager of environmental services for MEC.

Senior Consultant

George Joffé is an independent consultant and formerly the Deputy Director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London. He is now engaged in academic activities, independent consultancy and in journalism. His journalistic activities have included both print journalism and radio and television work on Middle Eastern and North African topics for the past twenty years. As a consultant, he deals with the political, economic and social affairs of the Middle East and North Africa, with special reference to Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Israel-Palestine and Iraq, and he has also been engaged in research and research management of work into international boundary disputes and international economic arbitration. His academic activities include both teaching and research.

He has written widely on topics connected with the contemporary history, economics, society and current affairs of the Middle East and North Africa and is currently engaged in writing a study of the contemporary crisis in Algeria, a book on the Qadhafi regime in Libya and an analysis of the Barcelona Process in the Mediterranean. He also lectures widely on these themes at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies where he is a senior research fellow in the Department of Geography. Mr Joffé is also a visiting fellow at the Centre for International Studies in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is also a visiting fellow at the Centre for International Studies at Cambridge University. He also acts as Director-of-Studies for the Mediterranean in the Instituto de Estudos Estratégicos e Internacionals, in Lisbon, which runs the EuroMeSCo network, an official confidence-building measure of the European Union’s Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. He is also linked to two consultancy groups, MEC International and Menas Associates Ltd. He is also the honorary secretary of the Society for Moroccan Studies, a founder member of the Society for Algerian Studies, and a director and founder of the Centre for North African Studies which is affiliated to the Centre for International Studies at Cambridge University and carries out a programme of forum discussions and public meetings on North African affairs, as well as supporting research initiatives in the area. In addition he is the founder and co-editor of the Journal of North African Studies.

Senior Consultant

Dr Emmanuel Karagiannis is a political and security analyst specialising in the Black Sea and the Caucasus regions. Before joining the MEC, he taught European and international politics at the University of Hull. In December 1999, he obtained the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Hull’s Department of Politics and Asian Studies. His field of research was the connection between oil transportation and security in the Caucasus. He received his B.A in European Community Studies from South Bank University in London and an M.A in International Security Studies from the University of Reading. He has written extensively about energy geopolitics in the former Soviet Union, ethnic conflicts in the Caucasus and Turkey, and Russian foreign policy. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Energy and Security in the Caucasus, London: Curzon Press, May 2001. He speaks fluently Greek, and he has a basic knowledge of German and Russian.

Senior Consultant

Public issues and corporate positions appear often intractably in conflict. Michael McKay’s métier is to imagine, design and implement the tools that avoid, manage or overcome the conflict. His expertise in corporate public affairsstrategy positioning extends naturally to marketingand managingtransformation. Many years of involvement in the markets of Africa, the Middle East, Europe, southern Asia, and the Americas have allowed him to develop a unique web of influential friends and associates from London to Washington D.C., to Paris, Berlin, Brussels and beyond. Through this powerful network, he is able to provide uncommon insights into the true sources of client problems. Hence the methods and actions he creates and advises result in unusually effective solutions.
Among numerous senior corporate positions, he was Director of Marketing Services of Rothmans International Exports in Zug, Switzerland, and then served as Senior Director, Corporate Affairs of Japan Tobacco International –formerly R.J. Reynolds International in Geneva, from 1993 until 2001. In his life as an independent advisor, Michael has addressed, on behalf of his corporate clients, issues such as the defence of freedom, contraband and smuggling, and transformation following major acquisitions. What he enjoys the most, after a thorough review of a client’s “intractable issues”, is to come up with a practical approach and an efficient method to defuse the problem. He obtained an Honours degree in Education from the University of Leeds before pursuing Management at the University of the West Indies, and International Relations at the University of Southern California. He is fluent in English, German and French. A dual Jamaican and British citizen, he lives with his family near Geneva in Switzerland.".

Senior Consultant

Bill Morrison began practicing law in New York in l965 and came to London in 1975, when he opened the London and Saudi Arabian offices for his firm. He has over the years been primarily involved in commercial transactions, specializing in banking, securities, merger/acquisitions and investment funds, with a heavy emphasis on Middle Eastern clients and transactions. He has lectured and written extensively on doing business in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia.
Most recently Bill was a partner in Brown & Wood, a law firm which specialized in investment funds, securitisations, structured finance and capital markets. Brown & Wood regularly lead the league tables for law firms operating in these sectors. He withdrew from Brown & Wood after it merged with Sidley & Austin in 2002.
Bill received his BA from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton and his LLB from Yale School. He is Senior Legal Advisor to The Trinity Group and a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), the International Institute of Strategic Studies and the Bar of the State of New York.
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Senior Consultant

Richard Muir joined MEC early in 2003. He retired from the British Diplomatic Service in 2002. He continues to draw on his Middle East and management expertise in private and public sector work.
He was Ambassador in Oman and then until 2002 in Kuwait. He was previously Chief Inspector of the Diplomatic Service and Principle Finance Officer with responsibility for FCO budgets including funding to the BBC World Service; he was also a non executive Director of Mott Macdonald International.

In his earlier career he served as the Middle East specialist in the Washington Embassy, twice in Saudi Arabia, in Tunisia and on Middle East desks in London. He has managed the FCO’s overseas information activities and has had secondments to the Cabinet Office (including the Top Management Programme) and to the Department of Energy. He speaks French and Arabic.

Senior Consultant

Peter Rogers has been a senior consultant with MEC since 1999 and is an international specialist in the Greek market. He is independently a member of the British Hellenic Chamber of Commerce and is active in partner identification for both Greek and UK clients. He project leads on Iran and is a leading member of the MEC Libyan business development group. He heads the procurement team specialising in partner identification across a number of key sectors particularly water, general infrastructure, engineering, construction etc. He is the MEC specialist on higher education and training, with particular expertise in UK university validation, accreditation and quality control procedures for overseas courses.

Senior Consultant

Ali Sewaidi is an Iraqi citizen and is the senior MEC Consultant and representative in Baghdad. A Sunni, he was born in Baghdad in 1931. Ali’s father was the lawyer for the British Embassy in Baghdad from the ’40s until his death in 1958 and Ali himself now runs his own law firm in Baghdad and is currently legal adviser to the British Embassy in Baghdad.

On graduating from Baghdad University in law in 1955, Ali joined the Foreign Ministry. After a year in the UN section he was appointed assistant to the head of protocol in the Royal Palace. On the coming of the Republic in 1958 he stayed in the civil service working at the time in the Republican Palace as Protocol Officer to the Sovereignty Council. He remained in government service until 1964, albeit with long breaks to study International Relations at London University and International Law at American University, Washington DC.

In 1964 he set up his own legal office in Baghdad and continues to run it today. Clients have included the Italian Embassy, Alitalia, Chloride Alcad (UK), Krupp, and Millers Pumps (UK). His address is P O Box 10148, Karradah 12921, Baghdad (tel 7781838; tel/fax 7781638; fax 7780026).

Senior Consultant

Paul Tempest is the Vice-President of the British Institute of Energy Economics, the Executive Director of the Windsor Energy Group and President of PTA London. He also serves on the Councils of the International Association for Energy Economics and the Montreux Energy Forums and as a Fellow of the Institute of Petroleum, London.

He was Director-General of the World Petroleum Permanent Council and Congresses (1991-99) following six years as Head of International Energy Policies Division in She ll International and two years in the Energy Department of the World Bank, Washington DC.

Based in the Bank of England (1959-83) he was Secretary of a number of UK Government/Financial Sector committees covering energy and the Middle East. During this period he was seconded for two years each to the British Diplomatic Service (Lebanon), British Gas, and  in 1970-71 as General Manager of the Qatar and Dubai Currency Board, taking responsibility at that time for note issue, foreign exchange reserve management and banking supervision in Qatar and all the seven member-states of the current UAE except Abu Dhabi.

His books include “OF THE DESERT AND THE SEA”, a guidebook to the Gulf (1972), “INTERNATIONAL ENERGY MARKETS” (1983), “THE POLITICS OF MIDDLE EAST OIL” (1993) and “WORLD PETROLEUM AT THE CROSSROADS” (1999)

Senior Consultant

Roger Thomas obtained an Honours degree in Turkish from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of London University.  He joined the Foreign Office in 1968 and was posted to the British Embassy in Cairo.  Between 1974 and 1978 he served at the UK Mission the EC in Brussels and later was appointed British Consul at the British Embassy at Ankara, Turkey.  He served in the diplomatic posts in Germany for eight years, first in Frankfurt and then as Consul-General in Stuttgart.  In 1993 Mr Thomas returned to the Foreign Office in London where he was responsible for British policy on Iraqi WMD and for the UNSCOM inspection teams in Iraq.  From 1997 to 2000, Mr Thomas served as British Ambassador at Baku, Azerbaijan.  He was made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in 2000 (CMG).  In 2001 he became Consul-General in San Francisco with responsibility for British commercial interests on the West Coast of the US.

Mr Thomas retired from the Diplomatic Service in 2003 and is now a senior consultant with MEC in London.

Senior Consultant

Sir Harold ("Hooky") Walker was a career British diplomat most of whose overseas posts were in the Arab world. He was ambassador to Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia and Iraq (in 1990-91). Since his retirement from public service he has worked entirely in the voluntary sector. For the first ten years his chief commitment was to the emergency relief and development aid agency CARE International, of which he was President (ie chairman of the board) from 1997 to 2001. Since then he has been Chairman of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, a membership organisation that promotes interest in all the countries of Asia. Among other appointments he was a Commissioner of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission from 1992 to 1997; over the same period he was an Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies.

Senior Consultant

Peter Wallis was a senior officer in HM Diplomatic Service. He is a Middle East expert having been posted to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the Yemen Arab Republic. During his time as Senior Political Officer in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office he was closely involved in matters of current significance such as the Middle East Peace process and the containment of Iraq’s ambitions. He was responsible for liaising with the Kuwaitis during and after the Gulf War. He speaks French and Arabic with some capabilities in German, Swahili and Russian.