Leonard Harlan served as chairman and CEO of the Harlan Company, a real estate investment banking and advisory firm, for nearly 30 years to 1995.

In 1987, Harlan co-founded the private merchant bank Castle Harlan. “We are one of the few folks in the business that can claim we are a truly international buy-out firm,” he told interviewer Maribel Aber at a recent International Mergers & Acquisitions Summit in New York. “We have our joint venture in Australia, and in turn we’ve opened an office under the CHAMP name in Singapore. We have been involved in Europe and the United States as well as Asia, and this gives us tentacles to deal with expanding of companies who are in the middle market but really wish to develop outside the immediate confines of the United States.”

The company’s roots reach back to the start of the institutionalized private equity market in the 1960s and the pioneering use of private equity limited partnerships as investment vehicles.