Lyons comes to AES from Austen Morris Associates, the China-based expat advisory firm. Prior to joining Austen Morris, he was a Doha-based European sales manager for Fidelity International, helping expatriate clients living there to invest directly in European assets.
The other two new arrivals to AES’s Qatar office are existing AES advisers who are coming from other AES outposts, according to chief executive Sam Instone.
They are Christopher Hall, an adviser who had been with AES’s Brussels office; and Stewart Massey, an AES adviser whose most recent posting has been in the Frankfurt Am Main region of Germany.
Education City
AES’s Qatar office is located in Commercial Bank Plaza in Doha’s Education City, which places it near the offices of a number of multi-national tech firms, as well as the Doha campuses of such US universities as Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, Texas A&M and Northwestern.
In a profile earlier this year, Instone said AES had set its sights on boosting its presence in the Gulf, by expanding in Qatar and Dubai, and, possibly as soon as later this year, opening its first-ever office in Saudi Arabia.
John Viney, chief operating officer and a partner in AES, said that for this reason the company is actively looking to recruit more advisers for the region, but stressed that "we are willing to go slowly if we have to, in order to get quality advisers – we are not looking to fill seats".
Currently the London-based company has 11 offices, and is regulated to look after clients in a total of 34 countries.
