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Our Team

Meet our directors

Sha 'ista Goga

shaista@acaciaeconomics.com

+27 10 590 6192 / +27 79 963 5684

Sha’ista Goga is an economist focused on competition and economic regulation with an interest in digital markets and network industries.

Sha’ista has provided advice on competition to various companies, regulators, and multilateral institutions. Sha'ista has extensive experience in economic regulation, particularly in the ICT, banking and financial services, ICT and energy sectors, and has advised on various sectoral inquiries in Southern and East Africa. She has also acted as an economic expert in contested matters before the High Court.

She has provided competition analysis and advice to clients on both mergers and prohibited practices cases in industries such as financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, broadcasting, publishing and printing, industrial components, and agriculture. Sha’ista has also advised multilateral and regional organisations on the development and implementation of competition policy and has been active in training authorities and regulators. Sha’ista is a former Part-time Member at the Competition Tribunal.

Sha'ista holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of the Witwatersrand as well as a Master of Philosophy in Economics from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. Sha’ista is a Visiting Researcher at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Ryan Hawthorne

ryan@acaciaeconomics.com

+27 11 880 1673 / +27 83 445 2185

Dr. Ryan Hawthorne is an economist working on competition and economic regulation. Ryan has led the economic analysis of a range of economic regulation projects. His expertise includes competition, cost modelling, and spectrum allocation.

Ryan has led developed cost models for fixed and mobile telecommunications networks for regulators in East and Southern Africa and has led various projects on price setting in telecommunications and energy.

Ryan has competition expertise spanning market inquiries, mergers, prohibited practices and cartels in sectors including telecommunications, property, financial services sector, dairy, news media, forestry, grocery retail and automotive components. Ryan has acted as an expert witness in litigation before the Competition Authorities in South Africa and Namibia as well as the High Court. Ryan has an interest in financial inclusion and digital financial services and has engaged in research on interchange.

Ryan holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Cape Town, a Master’s degree in Economics from the University of the Witwatersrand and a BBusSc (Hons), University of Cape Town. He has presented a number of papers at conferences and has several publications.

Meet our partner

Rahma Leuner

Rahma Leuner has expertise in competition, regulation, trade disputes, damages estimation and various other research. She has over 14 years of work experience and is currently a partner at Acacia Economics.

Her work spans a wide variety of industries including healthcare, e-commerce, telecommunications and broadcasting, retail, wholesale and distribution, consumer goods, agroprocessing, intermediate goods, airlines and gambling. Rahma has economics Masters degrees from both UCT and the Universiteit van Tilburg.

She has worked on expert economic reports, reports for regulators, costing models, policy responses, market inquiry reports, impact assessments, and a concentration tracker report for the Competition Commission.

In antitrust, she has experience working on mergers (telecommunications, airlines, gambling, batteries, retail, petroleum, protein, fleet management), abuse of dominance cases (cement, wholesale, pathology, conveyancing, wood product manufacturing, retail, pharmaceuticals, beer distribution, alcohol, broadcasting), market inquiries (healthcare, mobile data services, e-commerce, animal feed), impact assessments of competition decisions (chemicals, FMCG) and various research reports (a scoping study, an industry-wide concentration tracker, a merger threshold efficiency analysis based on a merger database).

Rahma also has experience in economic regulation, including in the healthcare, telecommunications (including mobile termination rates), fintech, energy, and gambling sectors and is increasingly working on damages (agriculture, banking, sugar, commodities) and trade cases (building materials).