Mark Kenderdine-Davies is general counsel of CDC Group plc (CDC) with oversight of the company’s legal, regulatory and tax affairs. Mark manages the company’s legal/tax team and corporate secretariat and sits on its private funds investment committee. CDC, established by HM Government in 1948, is the world’s oldest development finance institution.

Its mission is to support the building of businesses, to create jobs and to make a lasting difference to people’s lives in some of the world’s poorest places. CDC invests from its own balance sheet of over $6bn and has committed $13.2bn to African private equity funds, $800m to direct equity investments and $500m to debt investments since 2004. It is currently invested in 48 African private equity funds with receipts and profits from its investments recycled into new investments. CDC provides capital in all forms, including debt, equity, guarantees and mezzanine, to fund growth. It invests both directly and indirectly through private capital fund managers whose aims are aligned with its own. As a responsible investor, it seeks to add value by helping companies achieve good standards of governance and adopt strong environmental, social and integrity policies.

Kenderdine-Davies joined CDC in 2006 from Gartmore Investment Management where he focused on private equity and other alternative investments as legal counsel. Prior to that, he was legal counsel at Threadneedle Asset Management. From 1994 to 2002, Kenderdine-Davies lived in Vietnam working there as well as Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar as general counsel and senior investment executive at Indochina Asset Management, the manager of two private equity funds, and as executive director of an investment company.

Before the move to Vietnam, he was a partner at a London law firm. Kenderdine-Davies has an LLB (Hons) from the University of Liverpool and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School Of Business. He is admitted to practice as a solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales, is a member of the board and chairs the Legal and Regulatory Council of the Washington DC-based Emerging Markets Private Equity Association and is also a member of the Legal and Regulatory Committee of the African Venture Capital Association.