Tan Sri Mohamed Nazir bin Tun Abdul Razak

Special Advisor

Nazir Razak is currently the Chairman of an ASEAN private equity firm, Ikhlas Capital.

He retired as Chairman of CIMB Group in October 2018 after a 29-year career with the ASEAN banking group. He started his career in CIMB’s corporate advisory department in 1989, and he then served the merchant bank in various capacities before being appointed as Group CEO in 1999. After 15 years as Group CEO, Nazir became non-executive Chairman in 2014.

He spearheaded the Group’s transformation from a mid-sized Malaysian merchant bank into an ASEAN universal bank. Today CIMB is Malaysia’s second-largest and ASEAN’s fifth-largest financial services group by assets. CIMB Group is also a world leader in Islamic finance and ASEAN’s largest investment bank.

During his tenure as Group CEO, Nazir was recognised as Malaysia’s top executive/CEO on several occasions. He was the youngest recipient of Finance Asia’s ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ in 2009 and was awarded Euromoney’s ‘Outstanding Achievement Award’ in 2012. In 2015, he was the winner of the prestigious ‘Asia House Asian Business Leaders Award’. He was instrumental in setting up CIMB Foundation, a leading CSR organisation and served on the Investment Panel of the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) for 12 years and the board of Khazanah Nasional for 4 years.

A strong advocate of the ASEAN economic integration, Nazir was the inaugural Chairman of the World Economic Forum’s ASEAN Regional Strategy Group. He also led the establishment of the ASEAN Business Club, comprising the region’s largest conglomerates, and the CIMB ASEAN Research Institute.

Nazir graduated from the University of Bristol with a B.Sc. (Hons) in 1988 and obtained an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge in 1989. In 2009, he was the Chevening Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. In 2019, he was a Transformational Leadership Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University.