When I joined Alshaya International in the late summer of 2023, I walked into a landscape marked by turbulence. The geopolitical climate in the region was tense, supply chains were strained and IT costs were spiralling. But I’ve never been one to shy away from complexity. In fact, I thrive on it. My remit was to bring control, visibility and strategy to the Group’s global IT vendor landscape—and do it fast.

My first visit to the Burj Alshaya in Kuwait led my to snap this photo – and yes that is 36°C at 7 am!!!

What followed was one of the most demanding and rewarding chapters of my career. I introduced a robust IT Governance and Contract Management Framework that gave us a grip on compliance and brought overdue rigour to our vendor relationships. I led negotiations with some of the most formidable names in the business such as Microsoft, Oracle and Blue Yonder, ensuring every contract was not only cost-effective but strategically aligned to the Alshaya brand.

In the end, we delivered over $63 million in IT cost savings, a figure that still gives me chills. But what I value most is how I built a cohesive and supportive team from an ethnically and geographically diverse group of individuals.

My proudest moments weren’t just the big wins at the negotiation table, they were in the quiet progress made by the category managers and analysts in my team, whom I had the privilege to lead.

We didn’t just save the company money; we saved people’s livelihoods.

At Aviva, I found myself at the sharp edge of one of the most sensitive areas in modern business: cybersecurity. Working across three continents – UK, Canada and India – I was the commercial lead for every ICT and cyber security contract. This wasn’t just about procuring the best deals for Aviva and their customers, it was about safeguarding the digital backbone of one of Britain’s largest financial institutions.

Every deal I struck had to satisfy not only Aviva’s strict internal governance but also the evolving regulatory compliance frameworks and the stringent sustainability requirements set personally by our CEO, Amanda Blanc. That meant every vendor relationship had to be both defensible and sustainable.

I sat across the table from some of the most influential players in the sector, advocating not just for cost savings but for ethical alignment and long-term resilience.

Working alongside some equally professional and qualified people, I saw firsthand how commercial strategy could shape the security posture of a global enterprise.

This role taught me a great deal, in particular that the future of procurement lies in agility and insight. We can no longer afford to separate commercial decisions from operational impact, especially when the stakes include customer trust, information security and national cyber readiness.

Before the boardrooms and project reviews, I was a fighting a very different kind of challenge, one rooted not in technology but in justice.

My time working alongside QCs and solicitors at Bindmans was a formative experience, where my expertise wasn’t measured in margins or contracts, but in the clarity and precision of the advice I gave in support of a judicial review that reached the heart of government policy.

On 22 June 2004, the Minister of State for Children, Margaret Hodge, announced an immediate and indefinite suspension of adoptions from Cambodia, citing concerns over child trafficking and corrupt practices within the Cambodian adoption system. This abrupt decision, made without prior consultation, left my wife and I and numerous other British couples in a state of uncertainty and distress.

My wife and I were interviewed, assessed and approved to adopt boy/girl twins from an orphanage in Cambodia. We were acutely aware of the prevalence of corruption in poor countries like Cambodia and yet at the same time an immense amount of money is made through bribery, embezzlement and fraud, tax avoidance and evasion, insider trading and political lobbying in all of the so-called waelthier countries like Britain – pure, unadulterated hypocrisy.

As prospective adopters and the named applicant in the judicial review [Judicial Review case R (Charlton Thomson and others) v Minister of State for Children (CO/4555/04)], I advised the legal team through an intense period, bringing inspiration and insight that challenged the legality of the minister’s decision.

Our legal team argued that the suspension lacked explicit statutory authority and failed to provide transitional arrangements for those already engaged in the adoption process. Unlike the United States and France, which implemented measures to assess and potentially allow pending adoptions to proceed under heightened scrutiny, the UK offered no such provisions.

The judicial review was scheduled to be heard by the Administrative Court in April 2005. Our submissions highlighted the disproportionate power vested in the Secretary of State, the absence of consultation with affected parties and the lack of appeal mechanisms or transitional safeguards in the proposed legislative framework.

This wasn’t just legal consultancy. It was advocacy. And it confirmed something I’ve believed throughout my career: that the work that matters most is the work that defends fairness, demands accountability and refuses to accept the status quo when it hurts the most vulnerable.