Board and Consultants

Stuart Thomas, Executive Chairman

Stuart is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Spring Capital Limited, an investment company specialising in the energy sector, where he has been instrumental in building the business into a profitable enterprise. He has also held the position of Chief Executive Officer of Spring Seafoods Ltd, a diversified seafood production company. Prior to this appointment, Stuart was an oil and gas research analyst and holds a BSc. in Petroleum Geology from Imperial College, London. He is also an Associate of the Royal School of Mines.

Donal Boylan, Executive Director

Donal graduated as a Mechanical Engineer in 1985 beginning his career with General Electric Technical Services Company Overseas as a Power Generation field engineer in the USA, UK, Latin America and the Middle East including UAE and Oman. He then spent more than 20 years in the aerospace & defence sector with Aer Lingus, GE Capital and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) where he initially held senior engineering positions and subsequently, board level management and commercial roles in their aviation finance divisions.

He has an extensive network of Middle East and mainland China investment relationships as he founded business units and spear-headed business development in these regions at RBS from 2004 to 2009. He is currently the CEO of the $3.5 billion aircraft lessor Hong Kong Aviation Capital, the co-founder of a mainland China private jet charter business Red Diamond Aviation.

Rakesh Patel, BA Econ, FCCA, Executive Director

Rakesh joined Gerald Edelman, Chartered Accountants, in London in 1990 and qualified as a Chartered Certified Accountant in 1991. In 1992, he formed the corporate finance division, dealing with acquisitions, disposals, mergers, private placings and stock market flotations. Rakesh was involved in the acquisition of Ryman the Stationer and left the firm in 1996 to become Group Financial Controller of Chancerealm Limited, a group including Ryman Limited and Contessa Ladieswear Limited and was involved in the acquisition and integration of Contessa Ladieswear Limited. Rakesh returned to Gerald Edelman as a partner in 1997 until leaving in March 2003 to join Adler Shine LLP, chartered accountants where he heads up the firm’s corporate finance division.

Rakesh has been involved in more than 30 AIM transactions.

Chris Weafer, Non-Executive Director

Chris has a distinguished 30 year career as a top-ranking strategist and investment analyst in the upstream oil and gas industry. He is an expert in strategic analysis and asset selection.

Chris is currently Chief Strategist at Troika Dialog, the largest private investment bank in the CIS. Prior to this Chris was Chief Strategist at UralSib Financial Corporation, one of Russia’s biggest independent financial groups. Chris was ranked the number one Russia markets strategist by the Thomson Extel-Interfax 2007 Survey. Prior to joining UralSib, he held a similar position for five years with Russia’s Alfa Bank.

Earlier in his career Chris was head of equity research in South East Asia for NatWest Markets, based in Thailand, for two years. Prior to this he was Senior Investment Manager for the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest self-managed investment funds in the world. He held this position for seven years and was based in Abu Dhabi city. Chris began his career in the investment industry, specifically in emerging markets, with the Irish Life Assurance Company in Dublin.

John McKeon, Consultant

John was appointed as a Consultant to Niche Group in April 2010 to assist the company in identifying investment opportunities in the natural resources sector. John is extremely well connected, at government and ministerial level, with many of the oil and gas ministries in North Africa and the Middle East. He was a founding shareholder and former executive director of Circle Oil plc and was instrumental in building the international oil and gas exploration and production company with assets spanning Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Oman and Namibia.