Mr Baraa Shaheen

Baraa Shaheen is the Founding Convener of the Universal Owners Council (UOC), a London-based not-for-profit company limited by guarantee established to strengthen the governance capacity of long-horizon capital owners. UOC develops research, policy frameworks, and institutional infrastructure to help universal owners protect the legal, governance, and institutional foundations on which diversified portfolios depend, particularly across private markets, restructurings, and complex advisory ecosystems.

He is also the Founding Convener of the Centre for Consulting Integrity (CCI), a specialist not-for-profit company operating under UOC's institutional umbrella and focused on advisory-intermediary accountability, professional standards, and fiduciary integrity, and the founder of Balwara, an independent advisory platform focused on private-markets architecture, capital-markets integrity, and complex fiduciary risk. Across these platforms, his work examines how ownership rights are activated, priced, and enforced in markets where sophisticated capability has concentrated on the deployment side of the table.

Baraa previously worked in Saudi Aramco's Treasury Advisory Department, where he contributed to institutional initiatives including the KAUST endowment, the KAPSARC endowment, and Wa'ed, the Saudi Aramco Entrepreneurship Center, advised on the structuring and funding of Aramco Ventures, and led the evaluation and procurement of leading investment banks and financial and strategy consultants. He later developed a multi-year public-interest research programme on private-markets governance, fiduciary activation, advisory conflicts, bankruptcy integrity, and governance purchasing power. He is a regular member of CFA Institute.

His recent work has been published through platforms including the Oxford Business Law Blog, CFA Institute's Enterprising Investor, and the IMF Public Financial Management Blog, where "Public Capital and Latent Fiscal Risks" appeared in July 2026. He has provided policy analysis to the UK House of Lords Financial Services Regulation Committee in connection with its inquiry into private markets and is developing the CCI Code of Conduct and Professional Standards, a proposed framework for professional accountability, conflict management, and fiduciary integrity in the consulting and advisory industries.

His current research focuses on universal ownership, institutional integrity as a non-diversifiable systemic risk, private-market opacity, legal-rights activation, and the governance architecture required for long-term capital owners to act as responsible stewards of market integrity.