Bolaji Balogun
Bolaji has over 30 years of experience in investment advisory and mobile telecommunications. He is the Chief Executive Officer of Chapel Hill Denham, a firm he founded in 2005, and under his watch, has grown into Nigeria’s leading
investment bank and alternatives investment manager. He also serves as the Chief Investment Officer of the Nigeria Infrastructure Debt Fund (NIDF), the first infrastructure debt fund dedicated to and domiciled in Nigeria.
Prior to founding Chapel Hill Denham, Bolaji spent over 10 years in the investment banking and securities trading business of the FCMB Group as Executive Director/Chief Operating Officer before leaving to co-found Econet Wireless Nigeria, now Airtel Nigeria, in January 2001. Bolaji led the capital raising and license bid auction for the network operator’s US$285 million GSM license and spent four years at the company before it was sold to Celtel in 2005 for US$1.67 billion, a deal that remains Nigeria’s single largest successfully exited private investment. He left mobile telecommunications and returned to investment banking when he founded Chapel Hill.
Bolaji Co-Chairs the Private Sector Advisory Group on the SDGs, is Vice Chairman of Endeavor Nigeria and is a Director of Trustfund Pensions, one of Nigeria’s largest pension Fund Managers. He was the former Chairman of Lafarge Africa Plc, Nahco FTZ Limited, and a former Director of Nahco Aviance Plc and NASD Plc. He has also served on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange Africa Advisory Board.
Bolaji is an Economics (Honours) graduate of the London School of Economics, University of London.
Phil Southwell
Phil is a Partner at Chapel Hill Denham and Chairman of the Nigeria Infrastructure Debt Fund (NIDF) Investment Committee. He has spent more than 30 years in investment banking and principal investing, mostly focused on emerging and frontier markets in Asia, the Middle East, Central Europe, and Africa, and has advised on and financed many of Africa’s largest M&A and capital markets transactions.
Phil’s investment banking career started in 1994 with Smith New Court (now Merrill Lynch). He then spent 13 years at Deutsche Bank (of which 5 were based in Asia), where he held a variety of leadership roles for emerging markets including Head of Asia-Pacific for ECM; Head of Europe for ECM; Head of Coverage for Corporate and Investment Banking (“CIB”) EMEA; Board Director of DB Russia; Head of CIB for Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa; COO for CIB in EMEA. He later moved to Dubai firstly with EFG-Hermes as CEO of their GCC region and Head of Coverage, then with Bank of America Merrill Lynch as President, MENA region and ExCo member for Emerging Markets (ex-Asia) for all products and was then recruited as CEO of Exotix Partners.
Philip has raised capital and invested in real assets throughout his career and has listed and funded REITs in Australia, Asia (including Singapore’s first ever in 2001), and Europe (including the UK’s first ever in 2005).
Philip is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England & Wales and graduated from Durham University and Eton College.
Richard Rothwell
Richard is the Managing Partner and Founder of Stoneware Capital LLP, a company he founded in 2006 to manage an offshore hedge fund and has evolved to help establish and umbrella other managers and advisers working with professional clients across a spectrum of asset classes and jurisdictions.
Prior to founding Stoneware, Richard spent four years as the lead fund manager on a global US equity product at Northern Trust, for which performance rose to the top decile and funds grew rapidly to US$1.6 billion. He was also a member of the firm’s global Investment Policy Committee which allocated assets of more than US$600 billion. Before that, he was an emerging market equities fund manager at Deutsche Asset Management between 1997-2002 and a fund manager in long/short equities, including North American, Emerging, and Pacific Basin equities at Hermes Investment Management from 1993-1997.
Since starting his career in 1985 as a trainee chartered accountant and then audit manager at Arthur Andersen, London and Singapore, Richard has accumulated broad expertise as an investment professional, developed over years of meeting corporate executives from around the globe, managing assets at three of the largest institutional fund managers, including being a member of the global investment policy committees of two of these firms and chairing CFA UK.
Richard is currently a Non-Executive Advisor of Thornbridge Investment Management and Eschler Asset Management and has been the investment manager responsible for a wide range of funds and asset classes. He is a Natural Sciences (Honours) graduate of the University of Cambridge, England.