[3] Dr Harris has advised on hundreds of debt and equity issues as well as complex cross border transactions as a senior executive at leading global banks.
He has also acted for many noteworthy clients and been involved in high-profile transactions such as the £13.5bn hostile bid for British American Tobacco by Kerry Packer, Sir James Goldsmith, and Lord Rothschild.
This was the corporate finance advisory division of Apax, a private equity asset management firm which was founded by Maurice Tchenio, Sir Ronald Cohen, and American Alan Patricof.
In 1999, Harris left HSBC to pursue a number of interests as chairman or non-executive director of a range of public and private companies including Halfords plc.
Seymour Pierce, now part of an American securities firm called Cantor Fitzgerald, had been the number one ranked investment bank in London for LSE AIM listed companies.
[7] The firm had been a registered Nominated Advisor, or NOMAD, with authority delegated by the London Stock Exchange to regulate and supervise companies admitted to trade publicly on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) segment of the LSE.
[10] Khan is the owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars American Football team, which he purchased in 2011, having made his estimated £1.7bn fortune in the manufacture of car parts.
[14] In 2010, a cabal of Britain's leading businessmen calling themselves the Red Knights met at the offices of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, the law firm, to attempt to remove Malcolm Glazer, Manchester United's owner.
The leading figures of the Red Knights were: Jim O'Neill, a former HSBC investment bank chief executive and chief economist at Goldman Sachs; Paul Marshall, a partner at the hedge fund Marshall Wace; Richard Hytner of advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi; lawyer Mark Rawlinson, a partner in Freshfields' corporate practice, who advised United during the Glazer takeover negotiations; and Harris himself.