In 2016 he became president of the International Strategic Council - Mota-Engil Group, with a focus in Africa and Latin America. He is also a member of the international board of Pemex gas (Mexico), and was elected deputy chairman of the Portuguese Chamber of Commerce in 2016. Portas is a founding partner of Vinciamo Consulting and since June 2018, author of « Global », an international politics TV Sunday night weekly program on TVI. In the 90s he was co-founder of the successful weekly newspaper O Independente. Dr.
Previously he was Senior Fellow for International Economy, Director of the Energy and Climate Change Program, and Senior Research Associate at the Real Instituto Elcano in Madrid as well as the CAF Energy Fellow and Gulbenkian Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins University SAIS, in Washington. Recently he has also been a Climate Change Consultant for the World Resource Institute on land restoration in Latin America (WRI) and an Energy and Climate Change Consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) on low carbon transition.
Former Vice President and Executive Director at the World Bank, Executive Director at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Vice President at the Inter-American Development Bank. He was also Deputy Minister for international affairs at Brazil’s Ministry of Finance, as well as professor of economics at University of São Paulo (USP) and University of Campinas (UNICAMP).
In 1979, after implementing a wide range of governmental reforms, he stepped down from office and restored civilian rule. At that point, he retired from the military to farm and also became a fellow at the University of Ibadan’s Institute of African Studies, but following two decades of corrupt political leadership, Obasanjo presented himself as a candidate for president, and was elected in March 1999.
He is also a co-founder and Director of Irinoyi Energy, a renewable energy service provider using solar energy to generate clean, cost effective electricity through distributed micro-utilities for clustered rural communities, SMEs and urban and industrial sectors, and Managing Director of Star Delta Energy Services, panafrican Integrated Energy company with a core focus on exploration and production activities as well as oil and gas support services, in Nigeria and across the African continent.
She is a leading chartered accountant and co-founder in 1994 of Transparency International, former Vice President of the World Bank’s Africa Region Program. She has held several key positions within the Nigerian government including (from 2002) senior special assistant to the President of Nigeria on budget monitoring and price intelligence, where she led the institutional reform of the country's Public Procurement system through the establishment of the Due Process system in public contracting.
He was the Director of the National Defense Institute (1996-2000), Visiting Professor at Georgetown University (2017-19 and 2000), Visiting Scholar at the Institute for European studies, University of California, Berkeley (2004), and Senior Visiting Scholar at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies European University Institute – Florence (2010). He has published extensively on History of International Relations and History of European integration, Military History, Security and Defense Studies.
She earned her BSc in management information systems from Dar Al Hekma University and her MBA and PhD in clean energy transition from Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author of Greening the Black Gold: Saudi Arabia’s Quest for Clean Energy(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013). She completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at MIT, and is a recipient of the Ibn Khaldun Fellowship from the Center for Clean Water and Clean Energy at King Fahad University for Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) and MIT.
