Canberra-based Sententia Consulting continues growth with five new hires
Canberra-based professional services firm Sententia Consulting has continued its growth with a major recruitment drive in the past weeks.
Consulting trio Auneep Rahim, Robert Nichol and Sahana Sreenatha have all crossed to Sententia Consulting from Protiviti, while Priyanka Varma joins from Synergy Group, following in the path of former Synergy executive director Simone Knight who was recruited as Sententia’s fifth principal towards the end of last year.
David Battey
Meanwhile, the firm’s most recent recruit is David Battey, who has spent the past decade and a half with the Department of Defence, for most of that time as a director in areas such as fraud control, integrity frameworks, graduate programs, and commercial policy. Previously, he was an accounting group manager with staffing & recruitment agency Hudson.
Auneep Rahim
Rahim joins Sententia as a senior consultant, bringing a project management and engineering background with experience in oil & gas and renewable energy among other areas across both the government and private sectors. Only briefly at Protiviti, he previously worked in engineering roles at Visy and Shell on contract from Wood.
Robert Nichol
Crossing after the past four and a half years as a senior manager at Protiviti, Nichol brings further public and private sector audit and risk management experience gained over six years between accounting and advisory networks Vincents and KPMG, and is noted for his adeptness at addressing complex financial and operational challenges.
Sahana Sreenatha
The third of recruits from Protiviti, where she has spent the past two years as a manager of its business improvement team, Sreenatha also brings experience to her strategic advisory and program assurance role at Sententia from KPMG, as well as business services firm McMillan Shakespeare and more recently Accenture subsidiary Apis.
Priyanka Varma
An internal audit and assurance professional, Varma meanwhile crosses after five and half years at Synergy Group, latterly as a manager working with federal and state government clients across a range of portfolios, with the Australian National University commerce graduate also previously spending time at the Commonwealth Bank.
Senior leadership
Earlier, Sententia also pinched principal Simone Knight from Synergy, adding 25 years worth of advisory and public sector governance and strategic planning experience to the consultancy’s senior leadership team. Prior to her five years as senior manager and executive director at Synergy, Knight spent over a decade and a half in the Australian Public Service.
“I am excited to join Sententia,” Knight said upon making the move. “As a boutique firm, Sententia is values-based, and focuses on providing clients with the highest quality. Both of those things are really important to me.”
Knight follows fellow recent principal recruits Andrew Pike and Josie Lopez, respectively ex-Projects Assured and Protiviti (Sententia managing director Mark Harrison previously led the latter’s Canberra office), while former BDO partner and risk advisory leader Tom Fazio also joined the firm last year as a managing director to lead its expansion into Victoria.
Speaking last year with the Canberra Times on the resurgence of mid-tier boutiques in the wake of the federal government’s advisory clamp-down on the Big Four and other international firms, Harrison noted that Sententia had in recent times doubled its overall headcount and grown its revenues almost three-fold on the back of a 240 percent jump in government contract value.
With the switch in procurement mentality in part prompted by the PwC government tax scandal, Harrison told the Times; “This has helped the Commonwealth recognise you can get comparably strong support and advice from a non-Big Four. It has also shown agencies that they will generally see more senior people out of a mid-tier firm than they will out of a bigger firm.”
