Christopher Seymour, Managing Director for the Middle East and Africa at Mace Consult, appeared on the Big 5 Construct Saudi leadership panel examining governance, collaboration and transparency in complex project delivery. Mace is project manager for the first phase of Misk City, one of the programmes the session was framed around.
The leadership session on Big 5 Construct Saudi's conference programme this week examined governance, collaboration and transparency in complex project delivery, and put a consultancy at the centre of it. Christopher Seymour, Managing Director for the Middle East and Africa at Mace Consult, appeared alongside Darko Macura, Chief Executive Officer of Al Kholi Group, and Shonagh Kinnaird MCIOB, Project Director at Misk City.
Seymour's remit covers Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Qatar, Egypt and Sub-Saharan Africa, where he is responsible for the growth, performance and service of Mace's consultancy business. He has more than 35 years in construction, engineering and consultancy, including over 15 in the Middle East, and his appointment to the regional role was framed by the firm around bringing global delivery practice into the region's programmes.
It is worth being exact about what a conference listing establishes. The programme sets out the subject a session covers; it does not record the arguments made inside it. What the panel's composition does show is which organisations the Kingdom's construction industry considers qualified to discuss control of complex work, and a consultancy sitting between a developer and a contractor is the organisation that sees both sides of a governance failure.
Mace's connection to the subject is not theoretical. The firm is project manager for the first phase of construction at Misk City, the 3.4 square kilometre nonprofit city in Riyadh whose first phase opened in early 2026 against a 2035 completion target and an investment estimated at around SAR20.4 billion. That places the consultancy and the developer represented on the same panel on the same programme, which is an unusual and useful combination for a public discussion of how procurement and governance actually work between client and adviser.
The governance question in Saudi Arabia has a particular character because of the award rate. The Kingdom awarded more than SAR30 billion of construction contracts in May, its strongest month of 2026, and the Saudi Contractors Authority recorded 25 projects worth over SAR29.5 billion in June. Volume at that level concentrates risk in the interfaces: between packages, between consultants and contractors, and between a client's stated standard and what a sub-developer or specialist subcontractor actually delivers. Programme controls that work on a single building tend to fail quietly when the same organisation is running twenty.
Transparency, the panel's third theme, has become the practical mechanism most often proposed for that. In the Saudi public sector it already has an infrastructure: government tendering has been consolidated onto Etimad, and the large majority of public procurement now runs through digital channels. Below the award, on live sites, transparency still depends on what a contract obliges a supplier to disclose, and that is a negotiation rather than a platform.
For an audience of Saudi contractors and consultants, the value of a session like this is comparative rather than instructional. The delivery problems on the Kingdom's programmes are not unique; they are the problems of any market running many large projects at once with a supply base that has not yet caught up. Firms that have worked through that elsewhere have a perspective worth an hour, provided it is heard as experience rather than prescription.