CIOT has announced its team of officer for 2015-16. Chris Jones, director of tax markets at LexisNexis, takes over as president, with Bill Dodwell, head of Deloitte’s tax policy group, becoming deputy president and John Preston, a consultant and former  global head of external relations at PwC taking over as vice president.

The institute has also awarded two honorary fellowships, acknowledging the recipients’ contribution to the field of taxation. The first was awarded jointly to Dame Fiona, a former Lord Mayor of London and her husband Nicholas Woolf, who was formerly a tax partner with Arthur Andersen. The second goes to Professor Judith Freedman, who is currently Pinsent Masons professor of taxation law at the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation.

Sayer Vincent, specialist auditors and advisers to the charity sector, have promoted Noelia Serrano to partner. Currently a senior audit manager, Serrano started at the firm as a trainee 12 years ago and has developed the company’s approach and audit programmes for the specialised grant audits for USAID.

Baker Tilly has appointed Ian Williams as a director in its restructuring and recovery service line. A solicitor with over 25 years’ experience, Williams previously worked at SGH Martineau specialising in international corporate recovery cases and  has just completed his second term as vice president for international affairs of the American Bankruptcy Institute. The firm has also announced that Karen Tasker is to be the new head of its pensions centre of excellence in Southampton.

James Staveley-Wadham has joined the UK pensions insurance team at KPMG as senior manager. He brings more than 20 years’ experience and has led over 40 buy-out and buy-in transactions, ranging in size from £1m to £2bn. He will be responsible for advising clients on de-risking their schemes through pension insurance transactions. He joins the 30-strong KPMG pensions team from JLT, where he was a senior consultant responsible for buy-out and buy-in transactions, and was previously a senior member of Towers Watson’s risk settlement team.

PwC has appointed Lachlan Roos as its new UK hedge fund leader, taking over from Rob Mellor who is stepping down after leading the hedge fund practice for five years. Roos has been with the firm since 2005 and is a partner in the financial services tax division.

Sigal Zarmi has been named vice-chairwoman and network chief information officer (CIO) for PricewaterhouseCoopers International Ltd. She is responsible for the delivery of IT services to the PwC network and creating the technology roadmap for PwC Global IT enterprise-wide systems. Prior to joining the firm, Zarmi spent the last 17 years in a number of leadership roles managing different aspects of operations, technology and data services at GE.

Telematics company The Floow has appointed Eileen Clarkson as its first finance manager to direct and develop the organisation’s finance department after a period of rapid growth. With over 20 years’ experience, she joins The Floow from Ark Home Healthcare Ltd where she was financial controller. Prior to this she was head of finance at Little Chef.