Vincent Tchenguiz, the property entrepreneur-turned-technology investor, has teamed up with EADS, the European aerospace giant, to create a €150 million (£102 million) technology fund.

Occam Capital is the latest in what promises to be a series of ventures involving Mr Tchenguiz and British universities with the aim of investing the billions of dollars made available every year whenever European and American defence companies — including EADS — strike deals with emerging countries.

Mr Tchenguiz launched the Masdar $250 million (£126 million) fund with the Abu Dhabi government and Credit Suisse six months ago, which is investing in so-called clean energy businesses.

Now Mr Tchenguiz’s Consensus Business Group — separately run from his younger brother Robert’s growing pubs business — and EADS have co-invested in the first €35 million fund-raiser for the French-regu-lated Occam fund.

Occam, in turn, has bought into an IT company, the first of up to 15 investments expected over the next four years.

Mr Tchenguiz is looking to exploit one of the lesser-known features of the global defence business. When selling to most countries, particularly in the developing world, defence contractors typically have to put aside up to 6 per cent of the value of a foreign government sales deal, on top of the actual price of a contract, with the so-called “offset” money historically used to invest in building schools or hospitals.

Mr Tchenguiz has hit on the trend for Middle East and Asian countries to use the offset money for investing in technology and environmental companies, including green fuel oil alternatives.

Mr Tchenguiz told The Times that he is “in discussions with five other Middle East countries” to launch a series of investment deals. “With Kuwait we are developing a model and Libya we are looking at working a model,” he said.

Consensus is an investor in Imperial Innovations, the AIM-listed business arm of Imperial College, and has struck a separate partnership deal with the university. It is thought to have also held discussions with Cambridge, Oxford, Warwick and Manchester universities to look at partnering on commercialising technology.

Jean Pierre Philippe, an executive director at EADS, said that the Occam project, “should play an important role in developing the European IT innovation eco-system in cooperation with the EADS IT innovation needs”.

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