KPMG UK poaches Dr Stephanie Pantelidaki from Bakers to join London TP team
KPMG has announced that Stephanie Pantelidaki will join its Transfer Pricing (“TP”) team in London as Associate Partner.
With a PhD in Economics from London Business School and a distinguished career at Arthur Andersen, Deloitte, LECG and Baker & McKenzie, Stephanie is a high profile recruitment signalling KPMG’s determination to build its Transfer Pricing practice’s leadership position in the EMEA market.
Transfer Pricing is regularly cited as the most significant tax issue for multinational companies. With now around 70 professionals in its UK TP practice alone, KPMG has steadily built a multidisciplinary team of tax advisors, economists, accountants, financial analysts and industry experts to provide comprehensive services in connection with transfer pricing for planning, documentation and controversy resolution/litigation purposes. The rationale of strengthening the Economics within the UK TP practice is to enhance our competitive advantage by providing clients with innovative but practical solutions for their most complex problems by combining advanced economic and corporate finance techniques with more traditional transfer pricing analysis. Application areas include risk pricing, game theory approaches to bargaining, IP identification and valuation and supply chain re-engineering.
John Neighbour, head of transfer pricing at KPMG in the UK, said: “Transfer Pricing is deceptively simple in concept, being based on open market pricing, but determining market pricing for cross-border arrangements which happen only within a multinational group requires application of advanced economic thinking. With tax authorities and taxpayers concerned for opposing reasons about cash tax, Stephanie will enhance our capabilities to create and defend robust and innovative approaches. She will complement the extensive skills and experience of our team led by me, Andrew Hickman, Erica Howard, Debbie Green, and Stuart McDougall.”
Dr Stephanie Pantelidaki, commented: “I am delighted to be joining the KPMG team at a time when transfer pricing is so much under scrutiny. My joining at this very moment of the economic cycle is a token of KPMG’s strong belief in the value advanced economics can bring to clients facing increasingly challenging fiscal controls. Few firms can rival KPMG’s ability to offer the breadth and depth of its integrated multi-disciplinary advice, and I look forward to playing a key role in the team’s future success. In addition to KPMG being a leading provider of transfer pricing advice, its global network and range of complementary services means that we can go beyond a narrowly-defined transfer pricing remit to offer clients a broader range of insights covering a number of different management issues.”