BDO adds former Big Four duo Bill Yohana and Kristy Porter as partners

15 December 2023 Consultancy.com.au

Big Four stalwarts Bill Yohana and Kristy Porter are the latest leaders to be recruited to BDO’s partnership team, respectively joining the professional services firm in Melbourne and Perth.

Accounting and consulting network BDO has added two new partners to its Australian headcount ahead of the new year, with former PwC director Kristy Porter joining as the leader of its Western Australia sustainability & consulting team in Perth and Bill Yohana crossing from MinterEllison as a tax partner in Melbourne.

Together, the pair add roughly five decades of combined professional experience gained in both Australia and abroad.

BDO adds former Big Four duo Bill Yohana and Kristy Porter as partners

Kristy Porter joins BDO following a brief global procurement transformation stint at Rio Tinto, before which she spent the best part of a decade at PwC with a focus on the mining & resources and defence sectors, rising to the level of director. Earlier, she spent seven years as the founder and managing director of legal support and HR advisory Porter Consulting, being named a 2008 state finalist in Ernst & Young’s annual Entrepreneur of the Year awards.

Porter, who will now support energy & resources clients with their decarbonisation agendas, has hit the ground running since joining BDO, recently hosting a panel of experts for the firm’s final sustainability networking forum event for the year in association with CA ANZ. Among those present to discuss the topic of carbon credits was CA ANZ’s WA sustainability chair Lyndie Bayne, who kicked off her career as an audit clerk with KPMG in Cape Town.

Another Big Four veteran, Bill Yohana has meanwhile joined BDO’s transfer pricing team as a tax partner in Melbourne, crossing after a twelve-month spell at MinterEllison. Prior to serving in the legal firm’s financial transactions division, Yohana spent a decade as a managing director with Deloitte, the majority of those years in New York, before which he was a partner in Melbourne and an executive director at PwC, having first joined KPMG in the US in 1998.

“Bill brings more than 25 years of expertise in assessing transfer pricing concerns arising from financial transactions, including intra-group loans, credit guarantees, cash pooling arrangements and the evaluation of subsidiaries of multinationals for thin capitalisation issues,” the firm stated. “Additionally, Bill assists financial services companies, including banks, fintechs, asset managers and real estate investors on transfer pricing matters.”

The recruitment of Yohana follows the earlier poaching of former MinterEllison partner and KPMG director James Momsen to BDO’s M&A and corporate tax leadership team in Sydney, with Momsen also having spent time on secondment in the Big Four’s Big Apple office. BDO’s M&A division in Perth however recently lost a serious chunk of its own experience, with most of its senior leaders defecting to boutique local advisory Poynton Stavrianou.

More on: BDO
Australia
Company profile
BDO
BDO is not a Australia partner of Consultancy.org
Partnership information »
Partnership information

Consultancy.org works with three partnership levels: Local, Regional and Global.

BDO is a Local partner of Consultancy.org in Netherlands.

Upgrade or more information? Get in touch with our team for details.