Chris Evans (company director)

Dr Christopher Timothy Evans donated £25,000 to the Labour Party in June 1999 and more than £5000 in 1998. He received a knighthood in the 2000 New Years Honours List. He was one of the Bioscience bosses who wrote a letter to the Financial Times in May 2001 in support of the Labour Party. He collects sports cars, including Lotuses, Mercedes and Aston Martins.

Founder and Chairman of Merlin Scientific Services plc, he has been called the "Biotech King" and has connections with a large number of biotechnology companies. His personal fortune is estimated at £100 million. He is Chairman of Merlin Ventures and Merlin Biosciences (venture capital companies), Cerebrus Ltd (neuroscience), Enzymatix Ltd and Toad plc (an electronics company). He is a Director of a large number of other companies, including Celcis, Amedis, BioVex, Enviros Ltd, and Spacetrac Ltd.

He is also a Director of Chiroscience plc, which he founded, gaining £2.5 million from share options in 1998. Christine Soden,Chiroscience Finance Director, sits on the government's Working Group on the Financing of High Technology Companies, of which Herman Hauser is the Chair.

He sits on the board of the Merlin Fund (which is Chaired by Robin Herbert of Leopold Joseph plc, another Labour donor), a part of Merlin Ventures which is based in Jersey and which acts as a £39 million venture capital company.

The Merlin Fund has created 8 new bioscience companies (Evans is a Director of all of them): Cyclacel, Eurogene, Kindertec, Microscience, Neurovex, Pan Therix, Reneuron and Vectura.

He sits on the Government's Competitiveness Advisory Group Task Force, the Increasing Business Investment Task Force and was appointed to support Lord Sainsbury's research team on how "biotechnology clusters" could be developed. He is a member of the Task Force on Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) and the Business Environment Simplification Task Force.