Knowledge Center

In February 2024, a finance team at Pepco Group (a retailer with 4,800 stores across 21 countries) received what looked like a routine internal email. The sender appeared legitimate, the request was familiar, and the instruction was one that landed in their inbox every day: process a payment. They processed it, and then another, and by the time the fraud was identified, €15.5 million had been wired to accounts controlled by attackers. Pepco confirmed publicly that recovery was unlikely.

Why credibility, not calculation, decides whether a valuation holds.

A deal can survive a hard negotiation, a tight timeline, and an awkward diligence finding. It rarely survives a valuation the other side does not believe.

Much of the conversation around workplace culture tends to focus on the visible and the quantifiable compensation packages, career progression frameworks, office amenities, and employee satisfaction scores. These are not unimportant. But in my experience, they are rarely what defines how a workplace actually feels from the inside.

ESG is one of those terms that arrives in a boardroom as an acronym and leaves a question: what does this mean for us, and why are we being asked about it now? In the UAE, no blanket ESG mandate currently applies to most private businesses. Yet companies across sectors are finding ESG criteria embedded in financing processes, supply chain qualification, and investor due diligence — often before they have begun any formal ESG preparation. The Federal Decree-Law No. (11) of 2024 on the Reduction of Climate Change Effects formalizes a direction of travel that was already shaping commercial reality. The law is not a starting gun. The race has been under way for some time.

Nine in 10 interpreneurs in the UAE (90%) expect the environment for international expansion will become more favourable in the next two to three years, while just 5% expect it to worsen.

A year into consulting, the reality felt different from what I expected. I came in knowing the frameworks. I could build a financial model, structure a report, present findings. What I didn't fully grasp was how much of this work lives in the thinking before any of that. After a year at Kreston ME Consulting, working in industries across healthcare, pharma, manufacturing, F&B and childcare facilities, and closely with Freezone authorities on C-suite advisory work, here's what actually stayed with me.