Harvey Boulter


Harvey Boulter is an entrepreneur, the Chairman and Chief Executive of Porton Group, a venture capital group. He came to public prominence in 2011 through the Porton Group’s legal case with 3M alerted the UK press to what became the Liam Fox and Adam Werritty scandal, and led to the resignation of the former as UK Defence Secretary.

Biography

Harvey Boulter was raised in Worthing and went to the University of Bristol in 1988 where he studied Economics and Accountancy. Boulter graduated as a chartered accountant and as a member of the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment in 1994.
Boulter joined Union Bank of Switzerland in 1994 based in London. During this time, Boulter won an advisory mandate for the UK Ministry of Defence to consider the privatization of certain of their research assets. This led to Defence Evaluation and Research Agency being split into what became QinetiQ and Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, headquartered at Porton Down. It was here that Boulter first identified certain military technologies that were potentially of material value in the civilian sector. Boulter has held a number of security clearances, including Secret and Top Secret during his career.
In 2004, he was made a Fellow of ICAEW and in 2016 he was made a Fellow of CISI.

Porton Group

In early 2000, Boulter left UBS to found Porton Group. Under Boulter, as Chairman & CEO, Porton Group built a number of partnerships with Government laboratories, funding and developing technology for military purposes that have parallel commercial applications. Boulter funded initial research at Porton Down that led to the creation of P2i.
One of Porton's longer term and more significant investments which was sourced directly by Boulter from Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, at Porton Down is Enigma Diagnostics Limited. Enigma was designed to rapidly detect biological agents on the battlefield using a point of need portable molecular diagnostics instrument. Since the creation of the company in 2004, and with investment of over £140 Million, Enigma has developed, in part as a result of a partnership with GSK, into a point of care medical diagnostics business, achieving CE Mark accreditation in Jan 2014 on its Influenza A/B assay. In 2014, Enigma made a move towards the Chinese markets, first partnering with Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and then partnering with Leadman Bio whilst also securing a $50Mn investment from Shanghai Debay Capital.
In 2011, Boulter and Porton Group commenced litigation against 3M over the latter’s failure to fulfill their contractual obligations regarding their purchase of Acolyte Biomedical Limited, and the MRSA detection technology Baclite. In November 2011 the UK High Court found in favor of the Porton Group. However, Harvey Boulter as a public face in this complex law suit, exposed the unusual relationship between Adam Werritty and Liam Fox MP as a result of this bitterly contested litigation.

Porton Cyber

In 2012 Boulter created Porton Cyber, as a Cayman Islands investment fund. One of its investments in this space is focused on secure messaging and mobile voice protection technologies through Communication Security Group, of which Harvey Boulter is Chairman. CSG’s Seecrypt and Cellcrypt products use military-grade encryption for instant messaging and voice/conference calls, and are in use within UK, US, Canadian and Australian Governments.