Alvarez & Marsal kickstarts 2024 with fresh batch of senior advisors

The Australian branch of Alvarez & Marsal has gone on another hiring spree to kickstart the new year, with more than a dozen senior professionals joining the consulting firm across its various practices.

Professional services firm Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) continues to grow its Australian business through senior recruits, with more than a dozen fresh professionals joining the firm from the country’s biggest consultancies. According to David Willis, managing director at the firm, the consultancy aims to build a $500 million business over the next decade, and has already lured some 200 professionals to fill out its ranks.

“It has been an amazing few months continuing to build out Alvarez & Marsal in Australia,” stated Willis. “Our new managing directors build out our capabilities in energy and industry transition, infrastructure, turnaround, digital business transformation, mergers & acquisitions, and forensics.”

Among the latest crop of managing directors to join is industry veteran Owain Stone as the leader of A&M’s disputes & investigations branch. Stone has been with KordaMentha in Melbourne since 2008 after joining from Ernst & Young, and brings altogether four decades worth of forensic accounting experience dating back to the mid-1980s with Arthur Andersen in the UK and later Singapore.

Michael Buckley, the former leader of Accenture Interactive in Australia, has meanwhile joined Alvarez & Marsal as a managing director in Sydney to head up the firm’s digital and tech services business. Buckley was with Accenture for six years after serving as CEO of SapientRazorfish, and has since departing spent time in senior roles with Expert360 and Woolworths’ venture capital arm W23.

A&M has raided EY’s transactions tax team for the second time this year, with Jagmohan Singh crossing in Sydney to cover private equity and infrastructure. Joining from Deloitte, Singh has spent the past twelve years at EY and was elevated to partner mid-year. He follows the earlier reported quartet of EY tax partners Adam Woodward, Andrew Sharp, Sean Keegan and Edward Consett.

Also crossing from EY are Sanjay Sridher and Vikrant Mulgund, who join A&M’s supply chain and operations and performance improvement teams as managing directors in Sydney. The pair have been partners at EY since 2021, Sridher having previously served as a health and public service managing director at Accenture and Mulgund in a variety of roles in the energy and infrastructure spaces.

KPMG hasn’t been spared either, after an earlier hit to its finance and transactions practice. Described as a pioneer in the deployment of science and engineering personnel to augment the expertise of tax and accounting practitioners, three-decade company veteran and long-time global and national R&D tax incentives leader David Gelb is now a managing director with A&M in Melbourne.

KPMG has lost its national stamp duty leader Robert Nguyen to A&M along with more than two decades of experience, with Nguyen having completed the Big Four bingo card with stints at each of the members dating back to 1998. His former Deloitte Sydney partnership colleague Jeff Wong also joins the tax team, having been promoted to partner at the start of the year after a decade at the firm.

Elsewhere among the Big Four, former PwC partnership pair Amber Stevens and Graham Macgregor join A&M’s infrastructure and energy & resources practices out of Melbourne. Elevated to partner in 2021, Stevens has been with PwC in Australia for the past five years, arriving via the firm’s US branch, while Macgregor brings a further background at McKinsey and as an oil industry executive.

A&M also gains McKinsey & Company experience through the recruitment of Rowan Mawa and Yuval Bar-Sela to its turnaround business in Sydney. Most recently chief strategy & transformation officer at healthcare provider Healius, Mawa spent nine years at McKinsey rising to associate partner, while Bar-Sela is an ex-partner who spent over a decade with the firm between Sydney and Tel Aviv.

The firm has also recruited from outside the consulting realm, or rather lured tax experts Amanda Spinks and Anthony Fitzgerald back into the mix, with both having previously served at the Big Four. A director with EY until 2021, Spinks joins in Sydney from a senior finance role with Microsoft, while Fitzgerald crosses in Melbourne after a decade and a half in tax leadership roles at ANZ and NAB.