LEADERSHIP
Providus is comprised of unique and talented leaders with attributable skill sets and experience that are complimentarily to the organisations operational structure and trajectory. Each member of Providus embodies a supreme quality inherit to leadership, which is without question, integrity. For without it, no real success is possible.
Dr. LUKE KIRKE
Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder
Luke has over 25 years’ experience through various roles with Australia’s most reputable organizations, working across sectors including infrastructure (social, private and public), property as well as international capital markets. Firms have included the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX), Queensland Treasury Corp (QTC), Queensland Investment Corporation (QIC), Booz Allen Hamilton, Energex and Aurizon to name a few. Considered a thought leader, Luke exhibits a refined ability to advise, assess, fund and/or facilitate the funding of projects. Whether via undertaking bespoke capital raising funding or facilitating issuances of corporate, green, social or sustainability bonds, Luke strives to meet client’s interests via delivering transformative solutions, altogether underpinned by an ethos stemming from integrity, quality and prudency.
Outside of this work, Luke has provided reviews on critical infrastructure of national significance; submitted reviews towards the Harper Review in the shaping of national competition policy; as well as providing expert witness testimony on the pricing of infrastructure assets that have been in commercial dispute and litigation.
With this knowledge, Luke as developed in-depth experience across a number of skill-sets including the provision of commercial, strategic and regulatory advisory; the structuring and management of project-based finance; econometric analysis and evaluation; the shaping of both regulatory and policy development and associated compliance with state and federal regulators; and the performance of pricing, statistical and financial modelling.
Luke has also attained extensive academic qualifications including a degree in Bachelor of Business (Banking & Finance), a Graduate Diploma in Applied Finance and Investment, a Master of Applied Finance and a PhD in Corporate Finance specializing in Financial Economics. When altogether combined, educational experience constitutes some seventeen (17) years of tertiary academic studies within the corporate finance specialty above and beyond his employment experience.
HARSHANE KAHAGALLE
Chairman – Development & Infrastructure Advisory Board
Harshane is one of Australia’s leading property and infrastructure development lawyers. He has been a development financier and a lead arranger of both equity and debt facilities for development projects.
Having trained as both an architect and a lawyer, Harshane is the advisor on some of Australia’s most high-profile projects, including the iconic Barangaroo project since its inception. As a partner of a leading commercial law firm, he has helped clients to secure and preserve billions of dollars in development rights. Importantly, Harshane actively assists his clients to raise capital for projects for which he has also procured regulatory and development approvals.
He is a specialist in helping clients to secure necessary development approvals, including approvals for major projects and as such is currently acting for clients in landmark, high value projects. Harshane is also acting for clients in a number of test cases at the cutting edge of property development and planning law and on critical “bet the company” litigation. In addition to his legal pedigree, Harshane is also a trained architect and is passionate about the built environment, retaining insightful understanding of building and development processes.
In 2019, Harshane was awarded Leading Property and Infrastructure Development Lawyer of the Year (Australia) by Acquisition International.
ADAM KLEIN
Chief Operating Officer
Emigrating to the United States in 1976, Adam attended the world renowned and prestigious Harvard Business School from where he graduated with both his MBA (1979) and also his Doctorate of Business Administration (DBA/PhD) (1987), focussing upon leadership and strategic change. Leveraging such specialisation, Adam quickly moved into a combination of practical senior executive leadership responsibilities, combining strategy consulting, analytical rigor and academic discipline, to provide key insights and pragmatic actions for leading growth through constant innovation to drive strategic redirection of business organizations.
Such pedigree of roles saw Adam work with Boston Consulting Group and also as a Lead Partner with Booz Allen Hamilton. For the majority of the past 20 years Adam has particularly applied this expertise within the rapidly transforming media industry sector – driving innovation to embrace the strategic, leadership, operational and monetization challenges and opportunities for both the ‘established’ content-rich and the ‘technology led’ media companies as they each simultaneously address the continually changing demands within the global industry.
More recently, Adam has further leveraged his experience, particularly focussing on the monetization and funding challenges experienced across the property, infrastructure and commodities and resources sectors. Adam’s starting point of insight is always to understand customers’ interests and needs, thereby allowing him to innovate products and services that are highly valued, while at the same time developing solutions that are highly focussed.
SHENER DURSUN
Head of Infrastructure, Development & Funding
Middle East
Based in Australia, degree qualified in development and design, and holding a masters in construction management, Shener has 30 years’ experience in large-scale project management with individual budgets of up US$2bn. Shener has held senior positions at Meriton Group in Australia, Lend Lease and Dyldam, successfully delivering multiple, complex, safety-critical, and politically sensitive projects on-time and within budget, including Sydney International Airport and other major infrastructure.
At senior management and board level for the past 15 years, Shener was responsible for handing over thousands of residential units for Australia’s wealthiest individual (Harry Triguboff) with a total budget of US$3bn between 2011 and 2014, before delivering US$2bn in projects over the subsequent two years. Since 2016, Shener co-founded Modular Middle East and has been working with the Ministry of Investment and the Ministry of Housing in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on a US$15bn giga-project, and has secured a US$750m project to deliver modular housing into the Kingdom.
VINCENT SCIGLITANO
Project Director
Asia Pacific
Based in Australia, Vincent has 30 years’ business development experience particularly across the Asia Pacific region, where such long-standing experience has seen Vincent develop businesses’ across the entire growth spectrum.
With a key focus on green buildings, renewable energy, recycling, agriculture and aquaculture, Vincent is a champion of change, propelling both clients and industry into an environmentally sustainable future.
Retaining both strong strategic and commercial acumen that is built upon valued attributes of transparency, honesty and collaboration, Vincent brings to Providus a powerful skill set that allows the firm to help its clients in a more integrated way.
FAISAL HASSAN
Project Director
People’s Republic of Bangladesh
Emigrating to Australia from the People’s Republic of Bangladesh in 2008, Faisal has 20 plus years’ as an accounting specialist, having worked at prestigious and well respected firms including YML Group and Chowdhury & Company Chartered Accounting.
Highly proficient, proactive, tenacious and very much motivated to see demonstrable change undertaken in the Asia Pacific region, Faisal is particularly motived to see such change occur within the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.
Faisal is dual degree qualified having completed a Bachelor of Business (Accounting and Finance) as well as a Masters of Professional Accounting.