Jamaican billionaire Michael Lee-Chin's Portland Holdings signs Turkish nuclear deal in energy push

Michael Lee-Chin's Portland Holdings has signed an agreement to help develop Turkey's nuclear-energy sector, pushing the billionaire's growing bet on atomic power into a new market.

The Canadian investment group, founded and chaired by the Jamaican-born investor, signed a memorandum of understanding with Nuclean, a Turkish nuclear-technology company, at the Nuclear Power Plants and Energy Summit in Istanbul. The Nuclear Industry Association of Turkey backed the arrangement as a supporting institution.

The pact is a framework, not a binding transaction. Under its terms, the two sides will explore cooperation across four areas: training and human-capital development, technology engagement, industrial participation and supply-chain work, and talks over potential investment and financing. Any specific projects would move ahead through separate agreements and require regulatory approvals.

What Portland brings is access. The group has positioned itself as a bridge to Canada's nuclear ecosystem, a network of national laboratories, utilities, universities and engineering firms. Nuclean operates as a technology-neutral platform, pulling together technology providers, suppliers, investors and engineering partners working on small modular reactors and advanced nuclear projects inside Turkey.

Lee-Chin cast the deal around Turkey's own ambitions. He said the country has made clear that nuclear energy will be central to its long-term energy security and industrial strategy, and framed the cooperation as a way to link Turkey's nuclear sector with training, global relationships and emerging technologies.

The move extends a strategy Lee-Chin has been building for years. Portland signed a cooperation agreement with Canadian Nuclear Laboratories in 2022, then a deal with Dubai-based MBM Holding the following year. In 2024, Lee-Chin put nuclear at the center of his vision for the world's future energy mix, steering his funds toward uranium production, small modular reactors and downstream uses such as hydrogen.

He has committed capital to match the rhetoric. Portland became lead investor in a funding round for Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation worth as much as $350 million, a stake that came with a board seat for Lee-Chin and exclusive rights to commercialize the company's technology in the United Arab Emirates. The group also launched a fund built specifically to invest across the nuclear value chain as a replacement for fossil fuels.

His reasoning rests on a fixed template. Lee-Chin has long argued that the world runs on a hub-and-spoke energy model, fossil fuels at the core and renewables on the edges, and that the dirty center must be swapped for something equally dense, scalable and constant. The only source that fits, in his telling, is nuclear fission.

The Turkey agreement lands as Ankara accelerates plans to expand its nuclear footprint. The country is building conventional plants and courting small modular reactor developers as it tries to cut a heavy reliance on imported energy. That drive has drawn outside investors and technology providers offering capital, expertise and supply-chain links, and Portland is moving to place itself among them.

Lee-Chin is an unusual figure to plant a flag in the sector. Born in Jamaica, he built his fortune in Canadian wealth management after a 1983 bet on the industry, turning a single conviction into a diversified group with interests spanning clean energy, life sciences and finance. He counts Warren Buffett as a role model and has boiled his approach down to a handful of rules that prize owning a small number of high-quality businesses and holding them for the long run. His firm says it operates in more than 20 countries.

His reach extends into public life. Lee-Chin chairs the Government of Jamaica's Economic Growth Council and has directed his wealth toward healthcare, education and cultural causes across Canada and the Caribbean. Nuclear has become the defining theme of his recent dealmaking, and the Turkey agreement is its latest expression.

The commercial payoff remains distant. A memorandum of understanding commits the parties to talk, not to build, and the four areas it covers are broad by design, leaving the substance to be settled later. Turkey's nuclear program has advanced in fits and starts, and small modular reactors, the technology at the heart of Nuclean's platform, are still early in their global rollout.

What the deal does is stake out ground. It hands Portland a foothold in a market Ankara is determined to grow, and it deepens a nuclear strategy that has carried Lee-Chin from Canada's laboratories to the Gulf and now to Istanbul. The next test is whether the framework yields anything concrete.

Turning that intent into steel and reactors is the harder work still ahead.