PwC has slashed the jobs of about 60 partners and 1,500 staff from its Middle East business as a bust-up with Saudi Arabia\u2019s sovereign wealth fund rapidly slows the Big Four accountancy firm\u2019s growth in the region.<\/p>\n
The firm began to cull many of the roles from February, according to people familiar with the matter, when a bruising year-long ban imposed by Saudi Arabia\u2019s Public Investment Fund on new advisory contracts for PwC took effect.<\/p>\n
This exacerbated a wider drop-off in work for consultancies in the kingdom, the people added, as Riyadh recalibrates its huge spending of the past decade and reprioritises projects that had proven a boon for western consultancy firms.<\/p>\n
PwC had already begun to cut roles and assess performance in the region, according to people familiar with the moves. However, when PwC was put on \u201cthe naughty step\u201d by the PIF \u2013 a major client for the firm \u2013 leadership began calculating how to plug a likely \u201clarge\u201d revenue shortfall as a result of the ban in its most recent fiscal year and the next, one of the people familiar with the situation said.<\/p>\n
PwC had been one of the consultants used for gargantuan PIF projects including Neom, a futuristic $500 billion development along the Red Sea coast. But the accounting firm\u2019s attempt to hire Neom\u2019s chief internal audit officer and a reluctance to take on audit work that would conflict with more lucrative consulting contracts caused \u201cfriction and angst\u201d, according to people familiar with those events, resulting in the ban.<\/p>\n
Figures published on Wednesday showed that revenue growth at the Middle East business, which is owned by PwC\u2019s UK firm and had been its success story for the previous three years, had slowed to 0.4 per cent in the year to June 2025 compared with 26 per cent over the previous 12 months.<\/p>\n
The cuts have largely targeted consulting roles in the firm\u2019s Middle East practice, particularly affecting partners and staff hired to work on \u201ctransformational\u201d projects. At the end of PwC\u2019s most recent financial year, the firm had roughly 500 partners and 11,000 employees across the region, largely in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, according to a second person familiar with the move.<\/p>\n
The person said it was \u201cquite prudent\u201d to \u201crationalise\u201d the workforce, given that the business will \u201cno longer see double-digit growth\u201d.<\/p>\n
Despite the cuts, headcount has stayed roughly level in the region \u2013 made possible by new hires in areas where client demand remains strong. PwC promoted 62 new partners in June and continuously hires lower-level staff in large numbers, said a person familiar with its thinking. They added that PwC retained its ambitions to grow in the Middle East.<\/p>\n
The \u201creaction\u201d to the PIF ban had made the firm\u2019s leadership reflect on its governance, \u201cfreshen up the senior management\u201d and increase partner rotation throughout the firm, according to one person familiar with the matter.<\/p>\n
The move comes amid wider job losses at PwC UK. The firm acknowledged on Wednesday that a general slowdown had resulted in cuts, without specifying which roles. Figures showed that it employed about 33,700 staff in the year to June, down from 36,000 the previous year.<\/p>\n
A regional leadership shake-up is also under way for the top position in the Middle East, months after two important figures were separately asked to step down as a direct result of the ban.<\/p>\n
PwC declined to comment. \u2013 Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PwC has slashed the jobs of about 60 partners and 1,500 staff from its Middle East business as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":73870,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[79,18,19,17,2356],"class_list":{"0":"post-73869","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-pwc"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}