The People Network

A sourced chord diagram of 30-plus documented senior cross-firm moves in the UK economics consultancy market, 2000–2025. Who came from where. Who went where. A map of the visible senior-move layer, not a claim to capture every career move in the market.

Leath · April 2026 · 9 min read

A village, not an industry

Count the senior economists in British competition consultancy and the total comes to perhaps a thousand. This is a map of the visible senior-move layer, not a claim to capture every career move in the market. The documented senior-move layer has been in motion for 25 years. The pattern of who ends up where is not random; it follows the gravitational pull of three or four central firms, the occasional regulator, and the intermittent breakaway that rewrites the map.

What follows is the documented cross-firm senior-move set currently in the project ledger. Each ribbon is a documented person move or group-move event in the ledger. The width of the ribbon tracks the seniority-weighted flow, partners weighted more heavily than directors, directors more heavily than principal economists. Hover any ribbon to see the person, event, and year.

Five features of this chart deserve commentary before the numbers are discussed.

1. The big ribbon between Compass Lexecon and Econic

The fattest arc on the diagram connects Compass Lexecon to Econic Partners. The project people ledger and Econic's own public profiles now show a visible Compass-to-Econic cluster: Jonathan Orszag, Mark Israel, Kirsten Edwards-Warren and Enrique Andreu, whose Econic profile says he previously spent more than 10 years at Compass Lexecon and served as Head of the Brussels office. Part 5 tells the story in detail. On the chord diagram it is the largest documented single-event senior movement currently in this dataset, and it dominates the visual.

2. The Keystone build-and-drain

Keystone sits near the top of the diagram with two inbound ribbons carrying three senior arrivals, Coscelli and Hunt from the CMA, Calanchi from Compass Lexecon, and two outbound ribbons carrying three senior departures: Calanchi onward to Econic, Hunt to AlixPartners. (Caffarra's move to UCL sits outside this network of consultancies and so does not appear on the chart.) In two and a half years Keystone assembled a European leadership team and then lost much of the visible group; in this charted consultancy-move set, Coscelli is the remaining Keystone leadership name.

3. The CMA as a source node, not a destination

The CMA has a cluster of arrows leaving it, to Keystone, Oxera, Frontier, AlixPartners, and essentially no arrows arriving in this senior-move ledger. This is what Part 6 called the regulator-as-recruiter phenomenon: the visible flow is outward at the senior level. The public record does not show an offsetting group of private-consultancy partners joining the CMA in the same period. The chart can prove the outbound moves; it cannot see every internal promotion or junior-hiring response inside the regulator.

4. A surprising ribbon: AlixPartners to Compass Lexecon (Sangha, 2020)

Rameet Sangha's 2020 move from AlixPartners, where she was a Director, to Compass Lexecon is a useful arc on the chart because it runs opposite to the 2024–25 AlixPartners build-out. The same firm that is now hiring ex-CMA economists to stand up a competition-economics practice was, five years earlier, losing a senior director to Compass Lexecon. That is a market-structure clue rather than a proof of strategy: AlixPartners' visible economics build in 2025 looks different from the position implied by the 2020 Sangha move.

5. Frontier Economics has almost no arrows

Frontier is the cleanest node on the chart. The project move file shows very few mid-career arrivals or departures. Mike Walker's announced move from the CMA to Frontier, effective 5 January 2026, is one of the few inbound arrows in the charted decade. That is consistent with an employee-ownership effect rather than proof of one: profit at Frontier goes to staff rather than a small partner class, and staff who are drawing their share of profit have fewer reasons to leave. The Part 5 story about Frontier looks unlike the stories told about Baringa or Compass Lexecon.

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The top ten most-moved firms

Rank the firms by the seniority-weighted arcs touching their node — inbound plus outbound, using the same partner/director/principal weights as the chord diagram — and the top ten in this charted UK move set look like this:

Three observations follow. The first is that Compass Lexecon is the hub of this documented network: it has the largest total weighted flow in the charted move set. The second concerns RBB, which is an anomaly rather than an ordinary high-churn node. The founding 2002 NERA spinout gives it nine points of inbound weight, but after that only one further documented senior move touches it on the chart — Benoît Durand, a senior hire from the European Commission's competition side in 2008; Helder Vasconcelos, who joined RBB as a partner from Compass Lexecon in April 2025, is a more recent inbound arrival not weighted on this diagram. This project has not identified a post-founding RBB partner departure that founded a rival or a charted partner-level poach out of RBB. It is therefore the lowest visible post-founding churn node among the top ten in this documented senior-move set. Third: Frontier Economics sits just behind, with one weighted inbound arc across the chart window (the CMA-to-Frontier Walker move, weight 3) — the second-lowest-churn node on the chart.

The two firms with the lowest visible churn profiles in this senior-move set also have distinctive economic models. RBB runs a small closed partnership; Frontier runs on employee ownership. The interpretation is suggestive rather than conclusive: ownership structure may help explain the low visible churn, but the chart alone cannot prove causation.

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Four people to watch

Four named individuals are disproportionately central to the network. Follow their recorded arcs and leadership markers through the chart, and much of the visible story since 2020 becomes easier to see.

Stefan Hunt

Hunt has two cross-firm arcs across three organisations: CMA to Keystone, then Keystone to AlixPartners, with a final destination as of December 2025 at AlixPartners UK LLP. In this project file, he is one of the clearest examples of a single senior economist moving twice in three years and having each move stand as a story in its own right.

Gianmarco Calanchi

Five nodes in his career trajectory: UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, then OFT / CMA, then Compass Lexecon, then Keystone Europe, and finally Econic Partners. That is the longest trajectory any individual traces on the whole chart. If the porousness of the market needs one career to illustrate it, Calanchi's is the one.

Jorge Padilla

Padilla has one cross-firm arc on the chart and one later internal leadership marker. The charted arc runs from LECG to Compass Lexecon in 2011, when LECG went bankrupt and Padilla's European team transferred en bloc. The 2024 move from partner to Chair sits inside Compass Lexecon, so it is not a cross-firm arc; it matters because it marks who held formal European leadership as the biggest breakaway from Compass Lexecon formed around him. Many of the Compass Lexecon stories in this series run through his tenure.

Kirsten Edwards-Warren

One cross-firm arc and one leadership marker, one year apart. Edwards-Warren was named co-head of Compass Lexecon EMEA in February 2024. She walked out a year later with Orszag and Israel to co-found Econic Partners, and she is the only second statutory director of Econic U.K. Limited alongside Orszag himself — a structural position that makes her one of the most visible Compass Lexecon departures in the 2025 exodus. The framing of Econic as a breakaway from Compass Lexecon rests heavily on her name.

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