Meet The EMBA Class Of Entrepreneurs: Executives Today, Founders Tomorrow 

Franc Bogovic & Moustafa El-Baqqaly
Oxford Saïd Business School 

Venture name: Aquitara Impact Fund I, managed by 5I2 Capital B.V.
Date of founding: April 2025.
Program: Oxford Saïd Executive MBA (Class of J23)  

Tell us about your career background:

Franc: I have spent more than sixteen years in impact investing and venture building, in Belgium and in Southeast Asia. I was COO and Deputy CEO of finance&invest.brussels, the Brussels public investment company with €450 million under management. Before was a director at a boutique management consulting firm working on customer centricity and restructuring projects across Europe and was involved in setting up an emerging markets impact fund active Myanmar and Mongolia. Earlier in my career I served as a Member of the Flemish Parliament. Everything I learned in those roles, about how public institutions and private capital can work together, went into the way Aquitara is built. 

Moustafa: I come from international capital markets, where I spent over eighteen years. I was most recently a Managing Director at BTIG in London covering fixed income and investment banking, and before that I worked in equity derivatives and structured products at UniCredit and Société Générale. My career has really been about structuring complex products and presenting them to institutional investors. You learn how allocators think, what a credible risk framework looks like, and how to explain an unfamiliar opportunity in terms an institution can actually underwrite. 

What is your business/venture? Aquitara Impact Fund I is a closed-end impact fund, managed by 5I2 Capital, set up to address one of the most painful legacies of the twentieth century: the land in Vietnam that remains contaminated by Agent Orange, sixty years after it was sprayed. 

The fund works on three pillars. The first is remediation. With the help of our Belgian technology partner, we clean contaminated land using thermal desorption, a process that achieved over 99% efficacy in a 2022 proof of concept at Bien Hoa Airbase, the only successful Agent Orange remediation of its kind in Vietnam. The second pillar follows from the first. Under Vietnam’s legal framework, investment in remediation can be converted into land-use rights, and we are the only fund to have been granted this right, with our model fully endorsed by the Vietnamese Prime Minister. We develop that land into Eco-Industrial Parks powered by renewable energy, in provinces where demand for industrial land far outstrips supply. The third pillar is social. Together with VAVA, the national association for Agent Orange victims, we are building An Vui Marts, small convenience stores run by affected families. The first three opened in July 2025 and are already giving those families a steady income. 

What makes the model unusual is that the impact and the returns come from the same place. Remediation is not a charitable add-on. It is the economic engine of the fund. 

What inspired you to found this business? The realisation that the problem had quietly become solvable, and that nobody had built the bridge. More than 800,000 people in Vietnam still live with the consequences of Agent Orange, and new victims are being born into a second and third generation. Some 2.6 million hectares were sprayed during the war, an area close to the size of Belgium. For decades this was treated purely as a humanitarian file, dependent on aid budgets and political goodwill. 

By 2022 the picture had changed. The remediation technology had been proven on Vietnamese soil. Vietnam’s legal framework allowed remediation investment to convert into land rights. The country had become one of the fastest-growing economies in Asia, with a chronic shortage of industrial land. For the first time, there was a structure in which private capital could take on a problem that aid alone had never managed to resolve. When American funding for remediation was cut in 2025, that case only became stronger. 

There was also a sense of Belgian-Vietnamese responsibility. Belgium’s parliament was the first in the world to adopt a resolution supporting Agent Orange victims, and Aquitara has since grown into a flagship of the relationship between the two countries. 

Why did you enrol on the EMBA? 

Franc:  I had spent years at the intersection of public investment and policy, and I wanted to sharpen the commercial and entrepreneurial side of my thinking, ideally among people whose experience was very different from mine. 

Moustafa: After nearly two decades of specialisation in capital markets, I wanted breadth. Strategy, entrepreneurship, leadership, and honestly some room to think about what the next chapter should look like. Neither of us arrived planning to found a fund. Oxford simply has a way of putting the right people in the same room. 

How has the EMBA helped you/your business? In the most direct way imaginable: Aquitara exists because of it. We met as classmates at Saïd, and the venture grew out of conversations that started on the Program. A Belgian impact investor and a London capital-markets banker slowly realised their skill sets were two halves of the same fund. 

The Program shaped the business in quieter ways too. The frameworks for taking a venture from an idea to a real structure. Faculty and classmates who pulled the model apart long before any investor saw it. And a network that happens to cover exactly the ground this fund stands on: European institutions, Asian operators, and global capital. When your venture involves a Belgian fund structure, Vietnamese government relationships and international investors, that kind of network is not a nice extra. You lean on it constantly. 

What’s the one thing about the EMBA that you think is undervalued? The cohort, and what it can turn into. People apply for the brand and the faculty, but the thing that changes you is the group of people sitting next to you: senior, accomplished, from every industry and geography, challenging your assumptions for two years. In our case the proof could not be clearer. We found our co-founder in the classroom. The quants need the poets and the poets need the quants. That happens to be this magazine’s name, but it is also a fairly accurate description of how Aquitara came about. 

What’s next for your business? Execution. In February 2026 the Prime Minister of Vietnam gave his full endorsement to the Aquitara model and assigned the relevant ministries to coordinate its implementation. That moment capped a three-year journey which ran from the proof of concept in 2022, through the MoU signed during the Belgian Royal State Visit in April 2025, to recognition by VAVA on national television later that year. 

With that endorsement in place, our focus is on completing the fund’s capital raise, beginning remediation of the first sites, and progressing our Eco-Industrial Park developments in Ha Noi and Hung Yen provinces. Alongside that, we are scaling An Vui Marts towards our goal of 150 stores, each one a family given a path back to self-sufficiency. The ambition is easy to state and hard to deliver: roughly 150 hectares of contaminated land restored, up to 650 hectares of sustainable industrial infrastructure developed, and a model proven well enough to repeat. 

Would you recommend the EMBA to other entrepreneurs? If yes, why? Yes, without hesitation. Entrepreneurship turns you into a generalist overnight, and the EMBA compresses years of that learning curve into two structured years, without asking you to step away from your career. But the deeper reason is the one we lived ourselves. The Program is a founder-matching engine that nobody advertises as such. You spend two years solving hard problems next to capable people from completely different worlds. Some of them become your sounding board. One of them might become your co-founder. If you arrive with an open mind about what you might find there, and who, it can change not just how you build, but what you build and why. 

 NEXT PAGE: Rodrigo Borges, Rotman School of Management 

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