Ian Michie was an eminent banker and an expert on finance in the Middle East, where he helped to pioneer the concept of sovereign wealth funds that invest national assets, savings and currency reserves abroad.

Initially, the term applied to the foreign investments of oil-rich states in the Gulf, and as early as the 1970s Michie was advising Middle Eastern governments on how best to invest abroad their swelling pots of petrodollars. These revenues are now segregated into funds for future generations known as sovereign wealth funds, and during the current credit crunch, many international banks, including Citibank and JP Morgan, have applied to sovereign wealth funds as a measure to bail them out of cash shortages induced by overlending.

Ian Stuart Michie was born in 1929, the third son of a banker with the British overseas bank Grindlays. His brother, Donald, was a renowned geneticist and Bletchley Park codebreaker (obituary, July 12, 2007) while his other sibling, James (obituary, Nov 8, 2007), was the poet and publisher who supplied the Jaspistos column for The Spectator.

Educated at Marlborough College, Ian Michie was commissioned from Eton Hall, where he passed out second into the King’s Royal Rifle Corps (60th Rifles) while doing his National Service. Later he worked in East Africa for a trading company, but resigned during the Mau Mau rebellion and return to England — most unusually, he chose to travel by car.

In 1955 Michie became the first foreigner to be appointed to the headquarters of Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, which had been founded that year after a merger between the Chase National Bank and the Bank of the Manhattan Company. Four years later his employers sent him to Bombay with a brief to develop banking relationships throughout Asia.

Michie’s financial knowledge of the markets of South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa were to lead to him being frequently consulted on investment in these regions by British governments. His expertise was called upon in the US too: in 1969 the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington consulted him for its study The Gulf: Implications of British Withdrawal.

During the 17 years Michie worked at Chase Manhattan, he was a close associate of David Rockefeller. In 1972 he returned to Britain to work as a merchant banker and eventually developed a financial consultancy, which led to an association with Fiduciary Trust Company of New York, an asset management company.

He retired in 1998 to live in the Chilterns where he wrote an autobiography. His wife, Teresa, survives him.

Ian Michie, banker, expert on Middle East investment, was born on January 4, 1929. He died of Parkinson’s disease on January 29, 2008, aged 79