KPMG Abogados hires Héctor Ortega from PwC as tax director in the Canary Islands

KPMG Abogados has hired Héctor Ortega, previously at PwC, as a director in its tax practice in the Canary Islands, Iberian Lawyer reports. The move reinforces the firm's bet on a niche where local technical command matters more than brand size: the islands' own economic and tax regime.

Competing on local technique

The Canary Islands' Economic and Tax Regime (REF), with instruments such as the Reserve for Investments in the Canary Islands (RIC) and the reduced IGIC rate compared with mainland VAT, demands highly specific knowledge that island clients value above a generalist brand. That a KPMG group firm strengthens precisely that specialisation with an executive from another Big Four confirms that competition for tax work in the islands is fought on local technique and on continued senior relationships with the family business, the dominant fabric of the archipelago.

For mid-sized Canarian firms the move is also a warning: the large firms are no longer covering one-off matters from the mainland but building stable teams with local signing capacity, which will pressure fees and talent retention in the islands over the coming quarters. The appointment also fits a wider trend of senior professionals returning to firms where they developed part of their career, a move that lowers the risk of the hire for both sides.

The Big Four map in the islands

The four majors maintain offices in Las Palmas and Santa Cruz de Tenerife, and all of them have been reinforcing their teams as regulatory pressure and inspection activity increase across the archipelago. For legal-sector professionals, these moves open opportunities that we track in our jobs section, while the strategic reading of how firms position in second-tier markets belongs to our business development coverage. The growth pattern of Spanish firms betting on international business, like the one we analysed in Pérez-Llorca's 20% growth, shows that geographic specialisation pays when backed by real local capacity. More on the major firms in our major law firms section.

Ortega has built his career in tax advice to island companies, with particular experience in the application of the RIC, a mechanism that allows companies to reduce their corporate tax base by reinvesting profits in the archipelago, and in the structuring of operations subject to IGIC. His move comes as the tax agency and the Canarian authorities intensify verification of these instruments, which has multiplied the demand for advice on both planning and regularisation.

The Canarian fiscal niche has become, for the Big Four, a laboratory of a broader strategy: defending share in mid-market segments where local teams with real signing autonomy make the difference. The islands concentrate a singular combination of family groups with international operations, tourism and logistics investment, and an incentive regime under permanent political debate, all of which generates recurring work for whoever masters the detail.

For the clients, the practical difference of a reinforcement like this is measured in response times and in the capacity to defend a position before the administration without depending on teams located two thousand kilometres away. In a regime as debated as the REF, where criteria change and inspections multiply, that proximity is worth fees.

The islands' market has also seen a wave of regularisation files linked to deductions applied in previous years, work that combines technical knowledge of the regime with litigation capacity before the economic-administrative and contentious-administrative jurisdictions. That combination is precisely the profile that firms seek when they reinforce their local structure.

Source: Iberian Lawyer. This piece is informative and does not constitute legal advice.