AHR Corporate Advisory Services welcomes three senior partners

Three months after its launch, AHR Corporate Advisory Services has taken a big next step in its ambitions with the addition of three senior partners to its team.

The trio of John Martin St. Valery, Claire Duce and Greg Francis bring more than eight decades of experience to the consulting firm, which offers wealth management, financial and strategic consultancy to small and mid-sized businesses in the region. “We provide top-tier advisory capability at price points that work for SME’s,” explained Steve Drake and Stephen Watson, the Managing Partners of AHR Corporate Advisory Services.

“As we grow the business and brand, the time was right to accelerate our senior leadership team by admitting three very experienced partners to the team. John, Claire and Greg have a wealth of experience across multiple disciplines and sectors that will be highly relevant to our clients.”

John Martin St. Valery is a veteran of the Middle East with more than 24 years of experience in the region. He founded, built and sold one of the region’s leading company formation and restructuring specialist firm, Links Group. Since selling his business, Martin St. Valery has continued to support businesses (under the ‘Market Entry Solutions’ moniker) with scaling to accelerating their growth and with preparing them for acquisition, joint venture or capital raising.

At the start of 2022, Martin St. Valery was named in Britain’s New Year Honours list, receiving an Officer of the Order of the British Empire from the Queen Elizabeth II for his services to UK businesses in the UAE.

Claire Duce is a former PwC senior partner with more than 30 years of professional advisory experience, the last 14 of which have been served in the Middle East. Duce worked extensively in Europe and the Middle East supporting clients of all sizes with audit, assurance and their business challenges.

She specialises in the area of governance, risk and controls, with her most recent role at PwC being the regional leader of the Business Controls Risk and Controls Assurance teams.

Greg Francis has more than 30 years of experience in senior financial and executive positions in Europe, North America and latterly the Middle East/sub-Saharan Africa. Based in Dubai, he most recently served as the CFO of The Panafrican Group, a provider of agricultural and Forestry machinery and equipment to the companies in the mining, cement agriculture, forestry, infrastructure, power and energy sectors.

He started his career as a chartered accountant with KPMG in South Africa and England.