Independent senior adviser

Phil Solarski

I advise boards and senior executives on audit, risk and governance. That's been my work for more than 20 years, in the UK, the Gulf and across the Middle East and North Africa.

Background

My career started in international banks, working on internal controls, risk and regulation. The last 10 years and more have been at board and committee level in the Gulf, across financial services, infrastructure, healthcare and government-linked organisations.

I've sat on audit and risk committees for major infrastructure and aviation businesses and I'm on the board of a healthcare group in the UAE. The executive side of my career has been at a state-backed infrastructure fund, dealing directly with sovereign wealth funds, development banks and government ministries.

  • Chartered accountant, trained at Deloitte in the UK
  • Master's in Global Political Economy

What I do

01

Internal audit

I set up internal audit functions from scratch and fix the ones that aren't working, usually before a regulator or an investor comes looking. That covers the audit plan, quality reviews, sharing the work with outside firms and what gets reported to the audit committee.

02

Risk and compliance

Firms bring me in to set up risk management and governance properly or to sort out a compliance problem their regulator has found. The rulebooks I know best are Basel, Sarbanes-Oxley, the Saudi and UAE central bank rules and the international internal audit standards. All of this has been done inside working institutions under real regulatory pressure.

03

Banks and financial institutions

I spent years inside global banks working on controls, operational risk and compliance. Banks and other regulated firms in the Gulf now use me to design their controls, find where they fall short of the rules and bring them up to international standard.

04

Investment operations and fund governance

This comes from my years at a state-backed infrastructure fund investing across South Asia, the Middle East and the Gulf. I cover investment committee reporting, financial oversight of each asset, reporting to investors and co-investors and the way complicated fund structures are governed.

05

Audit and risk committees

These are committees I sit on myself, in infrastructure, aviation and energy. Boards and chairs ask me whether their committee is working, what its remit should be and what it should be seeing in its reports. Much of this involves assets spread across several countries, often in emerging markets.

06

Training

I run training programmes on governance, risk, compliance and crisis management. Clients have included major government-linked institutions and firms building these functions to international standard. Every programme is written for the organisation in the room and the rules it works under, so it sticks after I've gone.

Working with me

It starts with a call about 1 specific problem. I then quote a fixed fee for a defined piece of work. Email me the problem and 2 dates that suit you for the call.

Book the date.

phil@havenstone.me