Wayne Tarrant and Sam Claringbold join Horizon Nexus with their team
Accounting and advisory upstart Horizon Nexus Partners has poached a team of professionals from Melbourne firm MVA Bennett, including Wayne Tarrant and Sam Claringbold as partners.
Tarrant and Claringbold join Horizon Nexus with their assurance and outsourced finance solutions (VCFO) team after having been partners at MVA Bennet and 2023 merger partner JT&P, before which they both spent considerable time at PwC.
For Tarrant’s part, that was almost four decades worth of time dating back to 1980, including as a founding partner of the firm’s middle-market assurance practice, while Claringbold also spent well over a decade and a half at the Big Four firm to 2009.
“Extremely proud of and excited for the team to be joining some seriously talented people already at Horizon Nexus Partners, and looking forward to the ride,” Claringbold said in response to a LinkedIn post welcoming a further 27 fresh faces to the Melbourne office, including nine new starters across its deals advisory, tax, private enterprise, and people & culture teams.
An accounting graduate of Swinburne University, Claringbold joined Jeffrey Thomas & Partners in 2009 after having kicked of his audit career with PwC back in 1993, while Tarrant spent more than two decades as a partner across a 38-year career at the Big Four firm in Melbourne before jumping to JTP Assurance in 2018 ahead of its later MVA Bennet merger.
The old-school PwC theme is becoming a familiar one at Horizon Nexus, which was launched late last year by PwC veterans Rob Silverwood and Sanjiv Jeraj with the backing of private equity firm BGH Capital, and has since been making waves by picking off PKF’s practice in Brisbane and the Perth business of Nexia, along with Victorian accountancy Blaze Acumen.
That latter deal saw the addition of former PwC partner Frank Spillane, who first joined Pricewaterhouse in the mid-80s before breaking off to establish Blaze Acumen in 2004 alongside a number of directors and now Horizon partners. Meanwhile, up in Brisbane, PKFs local managing partner Liam Murphy started his audit career at Coopers & Lybrand back in 1987.
Among other former partners, Wayne Plummer, Horizon’s head of tax and risk & quality, joined PwC as a cadet one year earlier, while at the other end of the spectrum, the firm has been recruiting a stack of of former directors as partners in its corporate tax and deals advisory teams, including, ironically, some who had previously been poached by serial poachers BDO and Alvarez & Marsal.
Some of the newer Horizon Nexus partners with a PwC background – joining earlier veteran recruits Glen Hadlow, Mike Taylor, and Alastair McLean (the latter via Deloitte) – include Ciaran Donovan, Charlotte Hayden, and Daniel Dowell (the latter via BDO), and Reshma David and Armineh Aghazarian via A&M, with notably the majority of those listed based out of Sydney.
