Counsel for chief executives navigating transformation, turnaround, and special situations, in the markets where certainty is hardest to find.
Worldwide
By referral
Two principals · One practice
Every mandate has two faces: the work that must be built, and the work that must be defended. Chinook Strategy was formed to hold both.
Faizan Siddiqi, the operator, has spent two decades building and turning around enterprises across AI, media, logistics, and finance, in conflict and post-conflict economies. Chris Mathers, the investigator, spent twenty years undercover against organized crime and thirty years since advising the institutions that defend against it.
Building and protecting are the same job seen from two directions. The engagements that matter draw on both, from the first conversation.
Built around the chief executive’s actual week. The fourth form is reserved for when a situation has already turned.
A standing confidential relationship for succession, scope changes, talent calls, and the conversations that don’t reach a board pack.
Chief executive performance, succession, and governance during periods of change, backed by a decade of board service.
The pace of a sitting operator with the accountability of an outside advisor, for transformations where standing still is the greater risk.
Fraud, money laundering, hostile counterparties, and integrity failures that threaten the enterprise. No retainers, engaged only when it’s already special.
One built enterprises where advisors rarely go. One spent a career inside the criminal economy that preys on them.
Twenty years in the seat, operating, building, and turning around on three continents, in regulated and complex environments.
Faizan has run P&Ls through currency crises, political transitions, and infrastructure failure, scaling organizations from one person to a thousand and returning one of South-East Asia’s largest logistics businesses to operating profit. He is sent where the situation is hardest, and stays until it holds. His counsel today concentrates on financial institutions, governments, and founders navigating transformation, AI adoption, fraud exposure, and growth, often all at once.
Transitional CXO mandate at a Canadian SaaS ad-tech business in turnaround. Structural, financial, and delivery rigor restored within the first quarter; a one-year transformation mandate followed.
SaaS and PaaS group digitizing B2B2C value chains in emerging markets across pharmacy chains, life sciences, supply chain, and insurance. Built the on-shore and off-shore service organization end to end. Digital-onboarding IP acqui-hired by Zindigi (JS Bank).
One of South-East Asia’s largest 3PLs, twelve thousand employees. Took the logistics business from a compressed revenue position back to operating profit. Rebuilt the delivery management, rider, warehousing, and fulfillment platforms. Second direct Google Search integration of parcel tracking, globally.
Recruited by the sponsor to extend a lifeline to a legacy print and television business. Built digital from zero to the largest revenue contributor inside the seventy-year-old enterprise. 35 million organic page views with zero ad spend; 5 million app downloads in twelve months. First-ever Google News Initiative Award; Google I/O features in 2016 and 2017.
Employee number one in country. Scaled from zero to one thousand people in three years, owning the group’s largest P&L. Supported the company’s listing on the London Stock Exchange as part of the executive management team. Led delivery for AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, Comcast, and T-Mobile.
Built a transformation consulting service line in the Middle East. Originated new mandates with national utilities and sovereign wealth fund portfolio companies. Piloted the first national open data exchange in market.
Hired directly by the chairman and chief executive to stand up greenfield technical and pre-sales infrastructure for global launch. Built the ML talent hiring engine and standardized AI engineering induction. Cleared product audit by KPMG and McKinsey; the engagement led to McKinsey Solutions investing in the company.
Global SOX compliance at Tyco; sanctioned-country trade and political risk at GE Advanced Materials (Holland); systems and operations engineering at Verizon.
Verizon
Purdue University
Twenty years undercover inside organized crime. Thirty years advising the institutions that stand against it.
Chris spent his career undercover for the RCMP, the US Drug Enforcement Administration, and the US Customs Service, posing as a gangster, trafficker, and money launderer to infiltrate criminal organizations across North America, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe. He did not study how fraud is engineered. He performed it, undercover, to take those networks apart, then spent three decades putting that knowledge in service of corporations, governments, and regulators worldwide.
At Chinook, Chris takes special situations only. No retainers, no standing programs. He engages when money is moving wrongly, a counterparty cannot be believed, or a crisis has reached the executive’s door.
Two decades of deep-cover work inside organized crime, narcotics, money laundering, and fraud operations across North America, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe. Recipient of the RCMP Long Service Medal and the Commanding Officer’s Commendation for Exemplary Action.
Following his police career, Chris crossed into the corporate world, bringing field-tested investigative craft to complex financial crime, fraud, and corruption engagements for one of the world’s largest professional services firms.
Led the firm’s corporate intelligence company, responsible for international due diligence, offshore asset recovery, and the prevention of organized crime and money laundering for corporate and government clients worldwide.
Crime and risk consulting to corporate and government clients worldwide: foreign and domestic due diligence, AML compliance and training, complex financial crime investigation, cyber-security and digital forensics, executive security and crisis intervention, and physical security review, with presence in Toronto, California, and Panama City.
Chris brings the investigator’s lens to Chinook’s transformation mandates, engaged exclusively on special situations: fraud, money laundering, hostile counterparties, AI-enabled crime, and security crises in the geographies where Chinook works.
Chris has advised central banks, regulators, and enforcement agencies across the Gulf, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Americas, among them:
Every transformation widens the attack surface: new payment rails, digital onboarding, AI in production, unfamiliar counterparties. These are the situations where both lenses work as one.
Digital KYC and platform rebuilds at operating pace, the kind of onboarding IP a bank has acqui-hired under his leadership before.
Chris pressure-tests new payment rails the way a criminal would, because for twenty years, professionally, he was one.
Delivery discipline for national-scale programs, run like an operating company, not a policy paper.
Chris has advised anti-corruption bodies on three continents on how these schemes are built, and how they are dismantled.
AI teams built from zero to 250 in six months, cleared through audit by KPMG and McKinsey.
Chris briefs boards on how criminals already abuse AI for impersonation, and the countermeasures that actually detect it.
Restructuring from the operating seat: a twelve-thousand-person 3PL returned to operating profit is the reference case.
Financial-crime investigation and digital forensics establish where the money actually went, quietly, to an evidentiary standard.
Market access and structuring across Canada, the US, the Gulf, and South Asia, designed by someone who has walked it.
Due diligence and asset tracing answer the only question that matters before signing: do you know who you’re doing business with?
Continuity of the enterprise: decision cadence and stakeholder management while the storm passes.
Executive security, crisis intervention, and travel risk, delivered by someone trained for when these threats are real.
Most advisors cite the literature on financial crime. Chinook’s Special Situations Principal wrote it.
Crime School: Money Laundering is Chris’s bestselling account of how organized crime actually moves money, drawn from lived, undercover experience rather than case files. It remains a reference for compliance professionals and true-crime readers alike.
That authority carries beyond the page: he has hosted “The Egyptian Job” on National Geographic and consulted on feature films and documentaries.
Engagements span founder advisory, governance, market expansion, and transaction work. Client identities are held in confidence. Mandates marked SS carry a special-situations dimension.
CanadaPayment AggregationGo to Market & New Product Development SS
US · UAE · PakistanTikTok Designated PartnerCorporate Governance & Founder AdvisoryPakistanGeneral Digital InsurerTransaction Advisory · Sell-Side · Digital SSFastOutcomes · 1Bstories · AgentNoon · ECAS
Incelor Holdings · Namico D2C Brands · Baystern Media · Vavvengnette Brands · MixMind Industrial · Cavicor · GNUSemi · Allied Trust Family Office
A small, deliberate process. The orientation throughout is mutual fit.
Engagements begin only through trusted referral, opened by a brief written introduction.
A single confidential conversation, no obligation on either side, on the situation and what good would look like.
Either party may decline, plainly, with onward references offered where useful.
A short written memorandum defining mandate, cadence, and boundaries, signed before work begins.
Cadence follows the situation: weekly, board cycle, or daily presence.
Many engagements continue well past their initial mandate, measured in years, not quarters.
Urgency changes the protocol. Where fraud is live or a crisis is unfolding, write directly and mark the note “special situation.” It is read first, same-day.
Not every special situation is an investigation. Some are preparations: a new seat, a sale, an M&A integration. The same counsel applies, at the executive’s side, before the stakes arrive.
Chinook works with a small number of clients at a time, by trusted referral only. Write with a brief note on the situation, your timeframe, and who introduced us. A response follows within two business days; special situations are read first and answered same-day.