Christine Oliver and Greg Meredith join Ankura

Legal dispute experts Christine Oliver and Greg Meredith have departed the partnership of KPMG to join professional services firm Ankura.

The addition of the former KPMG partners to establish a legal dispute and expert witness practice in Australia takes Ankura’s local senior managing director numbers to six, following shortly after the promotion of M&A and corporate finance professional Preeti Inchody.

Oliver and Meredith have spent the past decade and a half as colleagues, joining KPMG as partners upon its purchase of turnaround consultancy Ferrier Hodgson four years ago.

Greg Merideth had been with Ferrier Hodgson for over three decades prior to the KPMG acquisition, joining the firm in 1989 after a brief stint at what was then KPMG Peat Marwick in Albury. Meredith brings an abundance of experience in technical accounting and valuations, including expertise in the quantification of loss and damage in commercial litigation. He is presently based out of Melbourne.

Christine Oliver who will serve as head of Ankura’s Disputes and Economics practice out of Sydney, first joined Ferrier in 2008, after an earlier thirty month stint at BDO. An expert witness and legal strategy advisor, Oliver has previously served in a number of senior leadership roles, including as dispute advisory head at KPMG and Programme Management Office and People & Culture lead at Ferrier Hodgson.

In a discussion with the Australian Financial Review, Oliver said part of the appeal of crossing to Ankura was the ability to serve clients without the conflict of interest concerns around a Big Four audit practice. “We don’t do annuity-type services like audit at Ankura so there is little scope for conflict here,” Oliver stated, adding that there was strong demand for in-court and reporting expert witnesses.

Also the chair of the Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand forensics accounting committee, Oliver further said that she would be looking to recruit another senior managing director for the practice before the year was out, while more broadly the firm was aiming to increase its staff numbers from 29 to 50 over the same period. Ankura launched in earnest in Australia in 2019.