John McArthur, the 70 year-old former corporate finance star at Kleinwort Benson and now boss of old-style independent investment house McArthur & Co, may seem an unlikely figure to associate with the Nirah project, an ambitious plan to build the world’s largest aquarium in Bedfordshire. Yet McArthur & Co has ten per cent of the project and its deputy chairman Peter May is chairman of Nirah.

May explains that Nirah – the ‘National Institute for Research into Aquatic Habitats’ – is envisaged as a ‘bio-domed’ complex four times the size of Cornwall’s Eden Project, housing tropical trees and plants and thousands of species of freshwater fish, amphibians and reptiles. After its scheduled opening in 2009, Nirah, whose chairman is ex-Trinity Mirror chief executive Philip Graf, could become commercial as a world-class research centre on endangered species and provide ‘an unprecedented resource’ for bioscience researchers and a major tourist attraction.

According to May, whose City experience includes NM Rothschild and Charterhouse, McArthur & Co specialises in pre-float financing. ‘We put Biofuels together’, he recalls, citing camping holiday issue Parkdean and Grosvenor Land as among the firm’s other deals, with green energy projects in Germany and Chinese ventures in the pipeline.