Simon Murray is an international financier and business leader with more than four decades of experience in Asia. Mr. Murray, a pioneer in the telecommunications field, is chairman and founder of General Enterprise Management Services (GEMS), a private equity firm based in Hong Kong. Mr. Murray has been a member of Lightbridge Corporation’s Strategic Advisory Council since 2006.
Mr. Murray began his business career at Jardine Matheson Group in Hong Kong, where he was responsible for the company’s engineering business and trading operations. Following that, for nine years Mr. Murray was group managing director at Hutchison Whampoa, the Hong Kong-based international consortium. He was instrumental in leading Hutchison Whampoa into the telecommunications market and negotiating the development rights for Orange, now one of the world’s largest telecom networks; he also significantly expanded the company’s energy interests via the acquisition of Husky Oil Company and Hong Kong Electric. In 1993 Mr. Murray became executive chairman of the Asia Pacific Division of Deutsche Bank, overseeing eighty offices in seventeen countries. He later founded Simon Murray & Associates and GEMS. Mr. Murray, a Commander of the Order of the British Empire as well as a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur of France, serves on boards around the world, including the Vodafone Group, Richemont, and Cheung Kong Holdings Ltd., and the advisory board of the Imperial College London.
Mr. Murray attended England’s Bedford School, after which he joined the French Foreign Legion in 1960 and served for five years in the Parachute Regiment, an experience on which his best-selling book Legionnaire is based. Mr. Murray has also attended the Stanford Executive Program in the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
