BrazilOliver Wyman makes high-profile partnership appointments in Middle East
Global management consultancy Oliver Wyman has announced two new recruits to its Middle East energy and digital practices; Heinz Pley and Manuel Abat Casas.
The Middle East branch of global management consultancy Oliver Wyman has continued to bolster its senior leadership ranks during the widespread business disruption brought about by the global coronavirus pandemic, with the recruitment of experienced duo Manuel Abat Casas and Heinz Pley as partners in Dubai. Together, the pair bring more than five decades of high-level professional industry experience.
Heinz Pley
Following the partnership addition of former Strategy& executives Andrew Horncastle and Nadim Haddad to Oliver Wyman’s regional energy practice earlier this year, the firm has now brought in ex-McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group veteran Heinz Pley to head up its Mining and Metals Sector offering for the Middle East & Africa. Pley crosses after serving for the past five years as BCG’s global head of mining.
A PhD.-holder in Structural Biology from the Stanford University School of Medicine, Pley from 1994 spent more than 16 years with McKinsey & Company out of Johannesburg in South Africa, rising to the post of Global Head of Mining and Expert Partner at the world’s most prestigious management consulting firm. He then joined Morgan Stanley in London, advising global mining companies on M&A and capital market transactions.
In 2013 he took up a mining and business bevelopment role at Mubadala in Abu Dhabi, credited with helping to shape the sovereign wealth fund’s mining investment strategy, before later joining BCG in Dubai. Across the course of his career, Pley has served numerous large mining and industrial players around the globe on strategy development and implementation, large-scale transformations, organisation redesigns, and strategic sourcing.
Manuel Abat Casas
Meanwhile, Oliver Wyman has also announced the partnership appointment of Manuel Abat Casas to its Digital and Communications, Media, and Technology practices in the Middle East, with Casas likewise to be based out of Dubai. An expert in Telecom, Digital and Analytics, Casas has amassed over two decades of professional consulting experience, including an earlier three and a half year stint at Cluster Consulting (now Oliver Wyman).
Kicking off his consulting career with a five-year stint at IMB Global Services, the Telecommunications Engineer graduate from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia then joined Cluster, where he delivered several large telecom programmes in Europe and Latin America. He would later spend 15 years at digital consultancy NEORIS, serving as EMEA president and as the founder and Managing Director of its business in the Middle East.
Having more recently gained a degree from the IESE Business School and completed an Executive Development programme with INSEAD, Casas specialises in driving large, customer-centric transformations and digitisation agendas, bringing expertise in AI/machine learning, process improvements and automation, advanced analytics, big data, and data visualisation. Oliver Wyman also made four regional partnership promotions at the end of last year.
