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’s sovereign wealth fund rapidly slows the Big Four accountancy firm’s growth in the region.
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’s Public Investment Fund on new advisory contracts for PwC took effect.
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.
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 “the naughty step” by the PIF – a major client for the firm – leadership began calculating how to plug a likely “large” 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.
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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’s attempt to hire Neom’s chief internal audit officer and a reluctance to take on audit work that would conflict with more lucrative consulting contracts caused “friction and angst”, according to people familiar with those events, resulting in the ban.
Figures published on Wednesday showed that revenue growth at the Middle East business, which is owned by PwC’s 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.
The cuts have largely targeted consulting roles in the firm’s Middle East practice, particularly affecting partners and staff hired to work on “transformational” projects. At the end of PwC’s 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.
The person said it was “quite prudent” to “rationalise” the workforce, given that the business will “no longer see double-digit growth”.
Despite the cuts, headcount has stayed roughly level in the region – 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.
The “reaction” to the PIF ban had made the firm’s leadership reflect on its governance, “freshen up the senior management” and increase partner rotation throughout the firm, according to one person familiar with the matter.
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.
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.
PwC declined to comment. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
