Senior Corporate Officer; Special Advisor; Geo-political Counsellor; Peacemaker in global theaters of conflict; Chartered Surveyor and Project Manager; Global Real Estate, Infrastructure, City Regeneration, Economic Development and Project Delivery
Mark J Finlay (Mark) is President and CEO of Ulster & London Ventures Ltd (ULV) and of ULV Americas, Inc.. Mark is a Congressional Special Advisor and serves leaders, including the C-Suites and Boards of some of the world’s largest and best known corporations.
Mark lives in the Washington DC Metropolitan area and grew up in Belfast during the Northern Ireland “troubles” that raged from 1968 until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and was actively involved in the peace process and in post-conflict transformation as an ambassador of reconciliation.
For 25 years, Mark worked as a professional, an Executive Director and principal, in development, regeneration and corporate governance of multi-jurisdictional real estate and investment vehicles and operational businesses. He is a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.
For a decade, from 1996, Mark was Development Director of a UK-based global real estate company, Scarborough Development Group plc (SDG) and Managing Director of SDG Property Holdings Ltd., through which he helped to deliver Public Private Partnerships, city regeneration, and port and infrastructure development projects. Mark was responsible for the transformation of HMS Rosyth, the former Nuclear Submarine base in Scotland — the UK’s most contaminated site — into a multi-campus business park, port and community resource.
During the mid-1990’s, from a platform of business and economic regeneration, Mark became involved with the Northern Ireland “peace process”.
In 2002 Mark was appointed by a Government Minister as a Commissioner of the Port of Belfast, the third-busiest port in the U.K., which encompasses Europe’s largest waterfront regeneration, known as Titanic Quarter, where RMS Titanic was built in 1909 and where more recently Game of Thrones and a host of movies were filmed.
He served in this public office for three years and was subsequently elected as Chairman of South Belfast Partnership, a cross-government initiative created following the Good Friday Peace Agreement to bring about transformation of some of the island of Ireland’s most disadvantaged communities.
In 2003 Mark was appointed a Director of the Ireland-US Council (IUSC) in Dublin and in 2016 was appointed to the Board in New York. The IUSC was created following President John F. Kennedy’s visit to Ireland in 1963 to promote economic links between the United States and Ireland.
In 2011 Mark authored Northern Ireland’s Global Diaspora Strategy to examine how to better connect with the region’s “scattered seed,” an estimated 58 million Irish and Scots-Irish in North America. In 2017 he authored the Consumer Code for New Home Ownership in the UK, designed to protect families and raise standards in the construction industry.
Since relocating to the United States, Mark has been involved in a number of significant diplomatic efforts and multi-lateral engagements, including Sino-American and European/USA Track II discussions, and has guided significant corporate leaders as they have overcome challenges and opened up new and valuable market opportunities.