James Egan

James Egan is the Chairman, Managing Director and founder of GC Partners Limited. He was a senior executive with Schroder, Darling & Co. Ltd, a consortium merchant bank with shares held by OCBC, Westpac and the Bank of Nova Scotia and a subsidiary of J. Henry Schröder Wagg & Co. Limited (London), where he established and led the firm's highly prominent Fixed Income Division with distribution desks in Sydney, Melbourne, London and Tokyo. Its focus was government & semi-government securities, stand-by letters of credit and corporate private placements as well as secondary market transactions and proprietary trading.

During his tenure at Schroders, Mr. Egan was also active in generating new issues of domestic and Eurobond securities for issuers in Australia, New Zealand and Japan. With the floatation of the Australian dollar on 8 December 1983 and with his involvement in the international capital markets, Mr. Egan was alerted to the opportunities in international currency and interest rate swaps. As a pioneer in these markets, Mr. Egan successfully concluded many transactions for his clients with a variety of international banks and financial institutions.

Mr. Egan was a founding director of Merrill Lynch International Australia Limited, with full responsibility for the Australian Merchant Banking operations and a member of the Executive Committee for Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc.'s Australian Operations. At this time, he was the youngest non-american to ever be appointed as a Director of a Merrill Lynch subsidiary.

At Merrill Lynch he led a team that established a global securities distribution platform for all AUD denominated issues. This was combined with one of the largest trading desks for Australian securities servicing domestic and global institutions, arbitragers and high net worth clients. Merrill Lynch International Australia's daily volumes of traded securities, including futures and options, were often the highest traded and distributed in the domestic and international market place.

He was later appointed Senior Vice President at Shearson Lehman Bros Asia Inc. in charge of the newly established Japan/Asia Desk for Sales and Trading based in London and later Tokyo. This covered all government, corporate and "house" offerings of non-USD securities including all UK and all major European Eurobonds, government bonds, convertibles and hybrid securities.

Since 1989 and throughout his career Mr. Egan has successfully led teams who have an outstanding track record and have continued to complete transactions for private and listed companies across various industry sectors that are based in Australia, New Zealand, SE Asia, China, the UK, Europe and North America. This included mostly cross-border Private Placements, Mergers & Acquisitions and IPO Planning and Management in the UK and in Australia. Mr. Egan has over 30 years of experience in the global capital markets with an extensive global network of investment and corporate contacts. He has lived in Sydney, London, Tokyo, Chengdu and Beijing. Mr. Egan opened GCP's first office in China in 2002. He resided in Chengdu in 2003 & 2004 and has resided in Beijing since 2005. He is a dual Australian and UK citizen.