Speakers

Bert van der Vaart has been president and chief executive officer of SEAF since May 1997. SEAF manages approximately $360 million in 16 funds in Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Central Asia, India and China. From August 1994 until May 1997, he was the director-general of SEAF’s first fund in Poland, CARESBAC-Polska. Prior to acting as director-general of CARESBAC-Polska, Mr. van der Vaart was the managing partner of the Brussels office of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, where he specialized in international corporate law, primarily with respect to corporate financings and mergers and acquisitions. Prior to that, he practiced law with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and Puender, Volhard and Weber in Washington, D.C., Paris, and New York, and Frankfurt, respectively. From 1983 through 1984, he was a management consultant with Bain & Company in Munich. From 1992 to 1994, Mr. van der Vaart served as the ABA Co-Chairman of the European Law Committee on Anti-trust, and from 1990 through 1991 he served as Chair of the USTR working group on EC Financial Services for the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy Negotiations for the EU. He has spoken on venture capital and the emerging markets to numerous audiences, including World Bank retreats, Wharton, IFC, SIDBI, Harvard University, the UN, and the IFC IFI Working Group on SMEs.

Mr. van der Vaart holds a J.D. from Yale Law School; a B.A. in Politics and Economics and an M. Phil. in Economics from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar; and a B.A. from the University of North Carolina where he was a Morehead Scholar. He also studied finance at the Yale School of Management. Mr. van der Vaart, a Dutch national, is a citizen of both the Netherlands and the United States and speaks English, Dutch, German, French, Polish and some Russian.