Meet The PB First Team – Our Expertise, Your Advantage
Our Team
Our team are experts in Global Tax Advisory. Together we bring a wealth of knowledge and expertise to navigate the intricacies of tax matters. We are driven by a shared commitment to delivering comprehensive, tailored solutions that meet our client’s unique needs. With our team’s extensive experience, proficiency, and dedication, we strive to alleviate the complexities of taxes and help our clients achieve their financial goals.
We pride ourselves on building long-term partnerships with our clients, working collaboratively to devise innovative tax solutions that maximise savings, minimise risks, and optimise compliance. Whether you require assistance with tax planning, structuring mergers and acquisitions, transfer pricing, or resolving disputes with tax authorities, our seasoned professionals possess the acumen and experience to address your specific needs.
Meet the Executive Team
Allow us to introduce our Executive Team, a group of exceptionally highly skilled professionals dedicated to providing exceptional tax services and guidance.
Dr Peter Wilson
Founder, Global Tax Advisor
Dr Peter Wilson is an international taxation adviser with more than 40 years of experience. He has advised companies, individuals, partnerships, trusts, foundations, investment funds and governments on taxation and international tax law. Beginning his career in Sydney, he later worked in London, New York and ultimately Dubai.
Dr Wilson advises corporate service providers, financial institutions, investment managers and administrators on client tax matters and reporting duties under FATCA, CRS and ESR. He also helps clients design controls that reduce tax risk. In addition, he supports clients during domestic and cross-border tax disputes and litigation before tribunals and courts. He guides family lawyers on tax issues that arise from disputed family investment entities in contested divorces. He also advises on regulatory issues and the formation of companies, partnerships, trusts, foundations and stock option schemes.
Dr Wilson’s practice covers tax considerations for mergers, acquisitions, demergers, splits and divisions. He also advises on public debt issuances and post-closing restructures. His work includes cross-border financial transactions, both third-party and intra-group. He handles post-acquisition restructures, due diligence, and individual and corporate redomiciliation. Dr Wilson advises on cross-border services, intellectual property, profits, transfer pricing and international tax conventions.
Over the years, he has advised on the tax laws of more than 75 countries across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas and Asia-Pacific.
Peter Whatley
Consultant
Peter has practised as a taxation and business advisor in South Africa and the Middle East for in excess of 30 years. He has experience in several industry sectors, including healthcare, education, financial services, wholesale, retail and manufacturing.
His main focus is on strategy, family business and business improvement using experience gained in both Public Practice and in Commercial roles. Areas of expertise include operational due diligence, auditing, taxation, corporate restructuring, M&A, technology implementation, supply chain and contract negotiations.
Peter started his career as an Articled Clerk with a leading accounting and audit practice in South Africa. This was followed by a role as a Tax Inspector with the South African Revenue Service, where he was actively involved in the rollout of VAT by way of leading pre-VAT implementation education programs to business leaders and the public as part of a national rollout. He trained tax inspectors, issued advance tax rulings and led VAT and corporate tax inspection teams. Peter is now heavily involved with VAT in the UAE and the Middle East generally.
Peter spent eight years as an audit and tax partner with Grant Thornton in South Africa, before taking up senior finance leadership roles with several well-known groups in the UAE, Qatar and South Africa. He has lived as well as worked in Qatar, and he now resides in the UAE.
Among Peter’s commitments, he is a founding partner of an award-winning Middle East accounting practice and a founding partner of a technology company focusing on digital transformation, automation and cyber security.
Peter is a qualified Chartered Accountant, CA(SA). He has a B.Com and a Postgraduate Diploma in Accountancy from the University of Port Elizabeth and an Advanced Taxation Certification from the University of South Africa.
Dr Alicja Reuben
Senior Consultant, Transfer Taxation
Dr Alicja Reuben is a transfer pricing expert and former management professor with over 12 years of experience. Her career began in Washington, DC, and expanded through roles in the United States, Spain, Poland and the UAE, where she has lived since 2016. She has supported clients across North America, Europe, East Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Her PhD comes from Columbia University’s School of Business, specialising in Law and Management. She has published research in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Accounting and Audit Research, the Eurasian Economic Review and Nature Scientific Papers. Her academic path started in 2013 at Manhattan College in New York City, and she later joined the faculty at New York University Abu Dhabi, where she served until 2025. Her transfer pricing work includes serving as lead trainer for PwC Academy Middle East’s Transfer Pricing Diploma. She also trained tax authorities in both Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Alicja first worked as a Senior Consultant at Deloitte in Washington, DC. She then advanced to Senior Manager in Tax & Legal at PwC Middle East, where she managed clients and supervised Saudi Arabian operations. Later, she led PwC’s Egyptian transfer pricing group. Her role evolved into Transfer Pricing Expert for PwC’s internal operations across Kuwait, Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar. She now serves as the Transfer Pricing Lead at PB First FZ-LLC in Dubai.
Maria Khattar
Senior Consultant, Financial Services & Taxation
Maria Khattar has extensive experience in international taxation and audit. She established herself as a trusted advisor with a proven track record of excellence in helping businesses navigate complex global tax landscapes. As a graduate of the American University of Beirut with a degree in Finance, speaking fluent Arabic and English and years of experience in the field, Maria has honed her expertise in advising multinational corporations ( including financial institutions), start-ups and individuals on cross-border tax compliance and planning. Her insights and guidance have saved clients substantial resources while ensuring full compliance. She specialises in financial instruments and financial institutions.
Maria started her career as an auditor at Ernst and Young and gained extensive experience in reviewing tax returns and ensuring that financial statements are compliant with the IFRS standards for various industries, including banking, factoring, sporting, hotels, casinos, electrical appliances and media.
Maria worked as an internal audit leader, auditing various banking processes and proposing to management value-added recommendations related to system enhancements, changes in internal procedures, and strengthening the internal controls. She is experienced in capital markets, treasury, liquidity and market risk, and trade finance.
As an in-house tax manager for Europe, the Middle East and Asia with a multinational group, she has also dealt with a range of tax-related obligations, from tax planning and compliance to international taxation.
Kennedy Munyandi
Taxation Specialist – African Nations
Kennedy has close to 30 years of professional experience in dealing with international and domestic tax issues. He has worked as a Regional Manager for Africa, the Middle East and Latin America at the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation (IBFD) in the Netherlands, as a Senior Manager at Deloitte Zambia, as a SeniorTax Inspector at the Zambia Revenue Authority (ZRA) and, on secondment, as a Tax Advisor at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in France.
Kennedy has managed numerous tax advisory assignments for major multinational enterprises in the mining, banking and financial, insurance, energy, telecommunication, construction, manufacturing and agricultural sectors. In tax policy, he has acted as a lead consultant on a number of assignments, including tax policy advisory and training for the Zambia Ministry of Finance, the Zambia Revenue Authority (ZRA) and for many Governments and tax authorities in the Sub-Saharan Africa region.
Dr Ajay Kumar
Office Counsel
Dr Ajay Kumar is an international commercial lawyer specialising in international taxation, development and financial crimes. Ajay started off as a qualified lawyer in India, and after more than 10 years of practice, principally as a litigation lawyer, he moved into academia. Subsequently, he qualified as a solicitor in England and Wales. Presently, he holds a full-time academic position with the University of Bradford, where he teaches on international taxation, Trusts and Banking & Finance. Before that, he held academic positions at different educational institutions in the UK, India and the UAE.
Dr Kumar was awarded a PhD in International Economic Law by the University of Manchester in 2015 for the thesis – ‘International Tax Coherence: A Development Perspective’. The thesis is a work in progress and focuses on tax jurisdiction, and looks at the principles and practices of the international tax regime while evaluating its efficacy for offering development. This is being developed into a monograph for publication by 2024. He also holds a master’s degree in international Commercial Law from the University of Aberdeen, UK and an undergraduate degree in law from Mahatma Gandhi University, India. Ajay has also co-authored a book published by Kluwer on ‘The Public International Law of International Taxation: Text, Cases and Materials’, with Asif Qureshi.
