Simon Edwards is the Chief Financial Officer of Dubai International Capital, responsible for overseeing the finance function including financial accounting and reporting, management accounting, taxation and treasury.

Prior to joining Dubai International Capital, Simon was Chief Financial Officer and then Chief Executive Officer of b-business partners, an Amsterdam-based venture capital/private equity firm established in mid-2000 to invest in enterprise technology companies in Europe. The company was backed by thirteen multinationals led by Investor AB (the main investment vehicle of the Wallenberg family and the largest industrial holding company in the Nordic region) and including Hewlett-Packard, AstraZeneca, ABB, Ericsson, SEB and Electrolux, which together committed €730 million of capital to the firm.

Before b-business partners, Simon spent almost eight years in the telecommunications sector, initially at Cable & Wireless in London where he held a number of senior M&A and operational finance roles and was involved in establishing new fixed line and mobile telecommunications companies around the globe. He spent a year on secondment to Mercury Communications, C&W’s UK subsidiary, where he established a corporate finance/M&A function for the UK and Europe, before becoming Director of Finance of Cable & Wireless Europe.

After C&W, Simon became Chief Financial Officer of PLD Telekom Inc, a NASDAQ-listed telecoms company based in New York. PLD was a provider of fixed line and mobile telecommunications services in various countries of the former Soviet Union, with Cable & Wireless and then The News Corporation as significant minority shareholders. In June 1996, PLD completed the first ever high-yield debt offering by a company whose business was focused exclusively on the former Soviet Union.

Simon has a first class honours degree in Chemical Engineering from University College London. He began his career at Shell International Petroleum, where he worked as a project engineer on a variety of on- and offshore oil and gas development projects, before joining Arthur Andersen where he qualified as a Chartered Accountant and worked as a management consultant specialising in the communications, media and broadcasting sectors.