Ankura adds senior professionals to Australian team
Now into its fifth year of business in Australia, professional services firm Ankura continues to promote and recruit fresh local leaders.
Ankura has continued to grow its Australian leadership team through a trio of senior director promotions and recruits since the start of the year. Most recently, Darren Gray and Surya Alapati have been bumped up to senior director level within the firm’s Sydney transactions, turnaround & restructuring team, while Leanne Tanner recently joined the Sydney office as a disputes & economics senior director.
The New York-headquartered firm has meanwhile celebrated reaching its fifth year in business in Australia, after – as noted by M&A and corporate finance senior managing director Preeti Inchody – starting off “with a blank whiteboard on the eve of Covid-19 lock-downs in 2020.”
Led by former KPMG partners Christine Oliver and Greg Meredith in Sydney and Melbourne, Ankura’s local disputes & economics practice has also now hit the one-year mark. Joining that practice is Leanne Tanner, who crosses as a senior director after eighteen months at global risk & dispute consultancy HKA in Sydney.
Tanner brings more than two decades worth of forensic accounting and investigations experience to her new role, dating back to a half a decade spent with Deloitte to kick off her professional services career. She later spent a lengthy period at Charles River Associates and as a director at AlixPartners in London.
Surya Alapati has been promoted to senior director alongside Darren Gray after first joining Ankura in 2021 from an investment banking analyst role with corporate advisory EAC Partners, prior to which he spent eighteen months in Accenture’s management consulting division in Melbourne.
Gray meanwhile joined in Sydney in 2022, spending the previous six years in corporate restructuring and insolvency roles at Rodgers Reidy and O’Brien Palmer.
In a post announcing the promotions on LinkedIn, APAC transactions leader Quentin Olde wrote: “Surya holds the rank of Jedi Master in the complex transactions Order, and is considered a wise and powerful Jedi helping clients maintain peace of mind in a time of discord.”
“Darren is our very own Boba Fett, technically not a Mandalorian as a New Zealand born clone, but with deadly weaponry and a silent demeanor is one of the most feared bounty hunters in the insolvency galaxy.”
Emma Jackman – likened to Princess Leia for being one of the greatest leaders of troops and “fearless on both the transactions and restructuring battlefields” – has also been elevated to director in Sydney, after less than five years in the business. After graduating an accounting masters with the University of Technology Sydney in 2019, Jackman spent a year as an associate at Ernst & Young before joining Ankura and rapidly rising to director.
