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. Peter has advised companies, individuals, partnerships, trusts, foundations, collective investment funds, pension funds and governments on taxation, international tax law and associated planning and compliance, firstly from a base in Sydney, Australia, then London, New York and now in Dubai.
He also advises corporate service providers, financial institutions, investment managers, and administrators on their client taxation matters, together with FATCA, CRS and ESR reporting obligations. Dr Wilson also advises on obligations and controls to be implemented for tax risk mitigation. He also assists clients in defending domestic and cross-border disputes with taxation authorities and in subsequent taxation litigation before tribunals and courts, together with advising family lawyers on the taxation consequences of disputed family investment entities in contested divorces. He advises clients on regulatory matters and entity (companies, partnerships, trusts, foundations, stock option schemes) formation, including countries or territories in which the entities may be formed.
Dr Wilson’s practice includes the taxation considerations (including indirect and miscellaneous taxes) relevant to mergers and acquisitions, including demergers, splits and divisions; substantial public debt issuances, including restructure post-closing; cross-border financial transactions, both third party and intra-group; post-acquisition subsidiary and asset restructure; acquisition due diligence; individual and corporate redomiciliation; cross border services, intellectual property and profits; transfer pricing and international taxation conventions both bilateral and multilateral.
Over the years, he has advised clients on the cross-border taxation laws of more than 75 countries in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, North and South America and Asia, including Australia and New Zealand.
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. Peter has lived as well as worked in Qatar, and he now lives 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 professor in management. She has over 12 years of experience in transfer pricing, starting in Washington, DC. Since then, she has worked at organisations in the United States, Spain, Poland and the UAE (where she has been based since 2016). She has serviced clients globally, in jurisdictions across North America, Europe, East Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Dr Alicja holds a PhD issued by Columbia University School of Business on Law and Management. She has published widely in top-tier academic journals such as the Journal of Accounting and Audit Research, the Eurasian Economic Review and Nature Scientific Papers. She began her academic career in 2013 as an Assistant Professor of Management at Manhattan College in New York City and continued to serve on the faculty at New York University Abu Dhabi until 2025. On the transfer pricing side, she was the lead trainer at PwC Academy Middle East in the Transfer Pricing Diploma. In addition, she has trained tax authorities in both Saudi Arabia and the UAE in transfer pricing.
Alicja started her career as a Senior Consultant at Deloitte in Washington, DC, USA. Moving to a Senior Manager role in Tax & Legal and PwC Middle East, she worked client-facing and oversaw Saudi Arabian operations, before leading the Egyptian team in their first transfer pricing group. She then moved to Internal Firm Services within PwC, where she was the Transfer Pricing Expert for all internal operations within PwC, including operations within Kuwait, Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar. Currently, Alicja is the Transfer Pricing Lead at PB First FZ-LLC (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.
