Route to the top- Tate & Lyle CFO

I was born in 1973 Luxembourg to Pakistani parents. We lived there at the time because my father was an executive at tyre company Goodyear. We moved around quite a lot, from Luxembourg to Austria to the US and Dubai.

I consider myself an internationalist. I attended international schools and really got the travel bug and liked the idea of following in my father’s footsteps and seeing the world, although an international business career was then at the back of my mind.

University in the US was culturally a bit of a shock, coming from Dubai to the US. I attended LeHigh University in Pennsylvania, where I studied accounting.

I didn’t want to be one dimensional, and realised it would be good to have another side so studied French literature as a minor. It’s still a passion, the very opposite of accounting as there’s no answers. My favourite writer is Marcel Proust.

Deloitte in New York, where I started out, was a great experience. The firm’s clients are very finance oriented companies, such as investment funds, legal firms, insurance companies, you meet all kinds of characters you wouldn’t have access to in a normal job.

It was a big change when I moved to the firm’s offices in Luxembourg, going from a big financial company to a small, rather muted office. But in the principality I met someone from Philip Morris that led to me joining the group’s corporate audit department.

I spent three years building a new company– because at the time Philip Morris was buying food companies in Europe- in countries such as Russia, the Ukraine, Morocco, Turkey. What they wanted was people to do due diligence and help them integrate the food companies into the broader organisation.

I learned about integrating different cultures, understanding operational challenges, cultural weaknesses to bring up to the standard of the company, and also how to evaluate what is good and what is bad, in a black and white way. Because it was a tobacco company, it had really high standards of compliance, internal controls.

The CEO of Philip Morris took the audit reports extremely seriously because he was a former auditor himself, so the visibility and the influence you had was huge. I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, but it really had an influence in terms of how I wrote the reports, what kind of rating I gave a country, whether it was a yay or a nay.

It imposed a sense of responsibility where you really wanted to be fair and at the same time be impartial, and that was critical. You learned that very fast because you had to prove your points. What it taught you at an early age was when you write up a report, when you’re sitting in front of a GM or an FD, you’re going to have a rigorous conversation to justify the writing up.

I developed the skill of keeping complex things simple because the reality is that business is complicated but when there’s a problem you need to understand why it is a problem, what the risks are. If you couldn’t articulate it, only talk in technical terms, no-one will really understand the answer to the question of why this is important- what can actually go wrong.

Philip Morris ended up splitting up Kraft and then Kraft spun off Mondelez, so even though though I was there 20 years it felt like five different companies, because every time you have a new owner, structure, policy, new ways of working. It developed in me resilience but also made me realise that I had to be agile, even back then.

You can have fairly strong influence on what the company can become, I soon realised. When Kraft bought Cadbury my job was CFO of the group’s European chocolate business, I had the responsibility of integrating the two companies in Europe. It took time integrating them, but by ignoring the noise outside and just focusing on creating a great business together, we built a nice team atmosphere because we were facing the challenge together.

At Mondelez I ran emerging markets finance– Africa, Middle East, Russia, Ukraine. The conversations there were all about driving growth, and making fundamental investments- getting the right people, getting the right compliance but also getting the right kit on the ground, making big capital decisions.

It was then to Europe which was all about restructuring the business and driving profitability in Germany, France, UK, where there were very established markets. It was all about identifying cost opportunities, which brands were under-performing that you could exit.

Part of the excitement of becoming group CFO of Tate & Lyle was being exposed as never before in my career. There’s a nervous excitement because you realise you are a public figure in a way- the buck stops with you. But I knew I did the best jobs in my career when I had stepped out of my comfort zone and taken risks, taken the jobs no-one else said yes to.

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