Group Finance Leadership in the Gulf: The Jobs Beneath the CFO

Group finance leadership in the Gulf is judged on one name, the chief financial officer. It is protected or exposed by three jobs beneath that name that boards rarely look at: the group financial controller, who closes the books and keeps them fit for an auditor; the group treasurer, who knows where the cash is and how the group is funded; and the head of tax, a job that became far more important when the UAE introduced federal corporate tax for financial years beginning on or after 1 June 2023. This report, the nineteenth in JOH Partners' Gulf leadership series, argues that these three jobs are staffed for the quiet years and tested in the loud ones, and sets out what a board can do about it before a sale, a refinancing or a tax assessment runs the test for it.

Three jobs beneath the chief financial officer

A Gulf board spends its finance time on the chief financial officer. The appointment is visible. It involves the chair, the investors and often the founding family, and a good one is credited with the group's financial health. What a board sees less of is the work beneath that appointment, where three jobs do the things that make the financial health believable.

The group financial controller produces the consolidated accounts, meets the reporting rules and keeps the books ready for an auditor. The group treasurer knows how much cash each company holds, what the group owes and when each loan falls due, and manages the banks. The head of tax looks after the group's tax position across its companies and countries, files what has to be filed and makes sure the accounts say the right thing about tax. None of the three is on the board. All of them sit within reach of a decision that could damage the group.

Figure 01FIG-01

The three jobs beneath the chief financial officer, and what distinguishes each

Job	What it owns	When it is tested	Reports to
Group financial controller	Consolidated accounts, statutory reporting, audit readiness	A sale, a listing or an audit	Chief financial officer
Group treasurer	Cash, debt, bank relationships, loan covenants	A refinancing, a covenant test or a cash shortfall	Chief financial officer
Head of tax	Group tax position across entities and countries, filings, tax in the accounts	A tax assessment, a deal or a change in the rules	Chief financial officer, or an outside adviser

Each of the three has been discussed on its own in JOH's earlier perspectives. The group financial controller and the group treasurer are set out in detail there. The chief financial officer is the subject of a separate body of work and is deliberately not the focus here. This report looks at the three together, because a board that understands them as a line, and not as three separate hires, asks better questions of all of them.

What the control layer covered, and what it did not

JOH's research on the control layer beneath the Gulf chief executive covered legal, risk and audit. Those are the functions that check what the business is doing and report on it independently. A board knows to ask who holds them and how they report, and the chief audit executive is the best-known example of the type.

The finance line is different in kind. These are not checking functions. They are making functions. The controller makes the accounts, the treasurer makes the cash position, and the head of tax makes the tax position. If one of them is weak, a checking function can eventually find the weakness, but only after it has done its damage, and only if the audit committee asks the right question. A board that has strengthened the checkers and ignored the makers has built a good smoke alarm for a house with faulty wiring.

The boundary with JOH's other reports is easy to state. Edition 13 covered the revenue mandate. Edition 16 covered the standing operating line. Edition 14 covered the checking functions. This edition covers the three finance jobs that produce what the checking functions are asked to examine.

The group financial controller: the person who closes the books

Gulf-listed groups report under International Financial Reporting Standards. A group with a dozen or more legal entities, in several countries, has to turn each entity's records into one set of consolidated accounts. That means agreeing accounting policies across the group, eliminating transactions between its own companies, translating foreign operations, and explaining every difference to an auditor. The person who does this is the group financial controller.

In day-to-day running the work is invisible. Management reports go out, the monthly pack arrives, and the numbers look reasonable. The weakness shows only when somebody outside the group asks for accounts to a standard they can rely on: an acquirer's auditors, a listing sponsor, a lender's reviewer. Three to five years of consolidated accounts that stand up to that scrutiny are a reasonable thing for such a party to ask for. A group that has not been building towards that moment finds, with a deal already announced, that it has a year or more of repair work to do.

A board can live with a bad quarter. It cannot live with accounts that an outside auditor will not sign.

The controller is also the person on whom the audit committee depends most heavily without realising it. The group financial controller interview guide sets out how a board tests a candidate for the role. The harder question, for a board that already has someone in post, is whether the group has ever asked that person to produce a full consolidation under pressure, to a deadline, as a test.

The group treasurer: the person who knows where the cash is

Five of the six Gulf currencies are pegged to the US dollar, and the Kuwaiti dinar is managed against a basket. A board that sees little currency movement tends to conclude that treasury is a quiet function. The exposures that hurt Gulf groups are of a different kind: loans that fall due in the same year, cash held in a subsidiary that cannot easily be moved to where it is needed, borrowing concentrated in two or three banks, and loan conditions, known as covenants, that tighten as a group grows without anyone recalculating the headroom.

Treasury choices also appear in published accounts more directly than they used to. The International Accounting Standards Board's amendments to IAS 7 and IFRS 7 on supplier finance arrangements, effective for annual periods beginning on or after 1 January 2024, require companies to disclose how they use arrangements in which a bank pays a supplier early and the company repays the bank later. A decision that might once have been a treasury matter alone is now a line in the notes to the accounts, which means the treasurer and the controller have to work from the same facts.

JOH's perspective on the group treasurer sets out three moments that expose the appointment and the one-page request a board can make. The central point for this report is that the treasurer is the only person in the group who can answer the question a lender or an acquirer will ask first: where is the cash, and how much of it can we reach?

The head of tax: a job that grew up in three years

For decades most Gulf groups had little need for a senior in-house tax function. Saudi Arabia has long operated zakat and income tax rules for companies, and groups with Saudi entities have dealt with them, often through outside advisers. In the UAE the position was different. Federal corporate tax applies to financial years beginning on or after 1 June 2023, as the UAE Ministry of Finance sets out, and a group with entities in both countries suddenly had two regimes, two sets of filings and a requirement to explain both in its accounts.

The second step followed quickly. For multinational groups with consolidated revenue of EUR 750 million or more in at least two of the four preceding financial years, the UAE introduced a domestic minimum top-up tax of 15%, applying to financial years starting on or after 1 January 2025. Not every Gulf group meets that threshold. Those that do have to calculate a figure that depends on the numbers coming from every entity, which ties the head of tax directly to the controller's consolidation work.

In JOH's observation, tax was often handled by a mix of outside advisers and the controller's own team in the years before these changes. Many groups have since appointed a named head of tax, but the appointment is sometimes made at a level that does not match the exposure. David Daly, a managing partner who advises UAE businesses, discusses finance transformation, tax compliance and radical honesty, and the conversation is a useful companion for any board asking whether its tax function has kept pace with its tax obligations.

Three moments that expose the finance line

The three jobs are tested at different moments, but the pattern is the same. An outside party asks for something the group has never been asked for before, and the answer depends on a job the board did not look at.

Figure 02FIG-02

Three moments that expose the finance line, and what usually comes to light

Moment	What the outside party asks for	What is usually found
A sale or listing	Several years of consolidated accounts to a standard an auditor will accept	Entity accounts that are sound individually but not consolidated to a common standard
A refinancing or covenant test	A group-wide view of cash, debt and forecasts	A picture that exists only in one person's spreadsheets, and headroom that nobody has recalculated
A tax assessment or rule change	The group's tax position across every entity and country	Filings that are on time but a position that has never been consolidated in one place

In each case the cost is not mainly the problem itself. It is the time. A sale delayed by a year of accounting repair loses momentum and often price. A refinancing that takes months where it could have taken weeks is done on worse terms. A tax position assembled in a hurry draws more questions than one that was ready. The common feature is that a decision made years earlier, about whom to appoint and at what level, set the cost of the day.

The finance line rarely fails on the day it is tested. It fails years earlier, when someone decides how senior each of these jobs needs to be.

Why Gulf group finance leadership is staffed for the quiet years

JOH's reading across its finance and control-layer mandates points to four habits that produce the same result in different groups. None of them is unreasonable on its own. Together they explain why so many groups find their finance line at the wrong moment. The wider setting for diversified groups is covered on the group holdings sector page.

The first is family ownership. In a family group the finance function is often seen as a cost to be kept low and a place for long-serving, trusted people. Trust is valuable. But it can mean that the knowledge of how the group's cash and accounts really work sits with one person and is not written down. JOH's research on the chairs of Gulf-listed family businesses is the companion read on how those groups are governed.

The second is growth by acquisition. Each company bought arrives with its own systems, policies and bank relationships. The group adds them faster than it standardises them, so the consolidation task grows more complicated every year without a matching change in the level at which it is staffed.

The third is the visibility of the chief financial officer. A board pays for the finance job it can see. The three beneath it are noticed less, and pay for them follows. This is a pattern JOH observes in other control-type appointments too, and it tracks visibility more than it tracks scarcity or the weight of the work.

Boards pay for the finance job they can see. The three beneath it are noticed on the day they fail, and not before.

The fourth is succession. When the controller, treasurer or head of tax leaves, the replacement is usually found inside the finance department, by the chief financial officer, with little board involvement. That is sensible when the successor is ready. It is risky when the departing person held knowledge that nobody else has. JOH's engagement building group-level functional leadership at a Saudi industrial holding shows how much easier these roles are to place when a group builds several functions at once with a clear agenda from the chief executive.

What a board should do first

A board does not need to restructure its finance function to find out where it stands. It can learn most of what it needs from a short list of requests and conversations.

Ask the controller for the consolidation calendar: how many working days after year-end the group's accounts are complete, what adjustments are made at group level, and who holds the workings. Ask the treasurer for one page showing cash by entity, debt by maturity, covenant headroom for the next four quarters and the share of funding provided by each bank. Ask the head of tax for a short note setting out the group's position in each country where it has a filing obligation, and what has changed this year.

Then ask who would step in if each of the three left tomorrow. Many boards find that the answer for at least one of them is a name nobody has spoken to the board about. Finally, hold a private conversation with each of the three, once a year, without the chief financial officer present. The point is not to bypass the chief financial officer. It is to give each of the three a route to say, in their own words, what worries them.

Boards that want a standing view of whether these appointments are performing against their brief, between audit cycles, increasingly use platforms such as Board Pulse to follow them. The route to the chief financial officer's own role is worth watching too. Santi Rasanayagam's conversation on moving from chief financial officer to chief executive across emerging markets is a reminder that the people who rise from the finance line often become the group's next senior leaders.

A forward view

Three developments are likely to sharpen board attention on this line over the next two to three years.

The first is the maturing of Gulf tax regimes. Federal corporate tax in the UAE is now several years old, and the top-up tax for large multinational groups took effect for financial years starting on or after 1 January 2025. The first assessments and enquiries under these regimes will test whether groups consolidated their tax position well. The second is disclosure. Supplier finance disclosure has been in force since 2024, and groups that use these arrangements have already had to explain them. Boards will expect their treasurer and controller to agree the numbers before the auditor asks.

The third is the pace of transactions. Gulf groups are increasingly buying, selling and listing parts of their portfolios, and each of those events brings an outside party with questions about the finance line. A group that has answered those questions already will move faster and more cheaply than one that is answering them for the first time.

None of these developments requires a board to hire more people. They require it to know which three it already has, and what each would be asked on the worst day.

Methodology and evidence base

This report is a public-source and qualitative reading. It draws on three layers. The first is published accounting, governance and tax rules, including the IASB's amendments to IAS 7 and IFRS 7 on supplier finance arrangements, the UAE federal corporate tax law and its domestic minimum top-up tax, and the UK Financial Reporting Council's Corporate Governance Code 2024 as a comparator. The second is public disclosure by Gulf-listed groups and published search-interest data from DataForSEO for the three roles, used to indicate interest and not as JOH data. The third is JOH Partners' own qualitative observation across its finance and control-layer mandates and its 1,000+ senior placements since 2014, labelled throughout as observation.

No compensation figure appears in this report. Where JOH has published compensation research, readers are referred to the 2026 Gulf Operator CEO Index (edition 1) and the Gulf Executive Reward Report 2026 (edition 7). There is no proprietary dataset behind this report and none is claimed. The worked example in the PDF edition is an illustrative composite and not an account of any client. The UK comparison is used as a benchmark question, and the report has not reviewed every Gulf listing rule against it. JOH's reading is heavier for groups where it has direct mandate experience and lighter elsewhere, and it should be read as directional.

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JOH Partners is an executive search and senior executive recruitment firm advising boards, family groups and sovereign-adjacent platforms on group financial controller, group treasurer, head of tax and wider finance-line appointments across the GCC, the UK and Singapore. For the full report, download the PDF above, then engage a partner for a confidential conversation about who holds the finance line in your group today. Boards that want continuing visibility of how these appointments are performing can also request a Board Pulse demo.