Hugo J.A. van der Zee studied civil and corporate law at the University of Nijmegen and tax law at the University of Leiden. He attended various curriculums, a.o. at IMD (Lausanne, Switzerland), one of the leading European business schools. Hugo started his professional career as Inspector of Internal Revenue (corporate taxation) in Arnhem. In January 1985, he joined Begheijn & Sneep as tax adviser. After the merger in 1990 with Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, he was admitted to the partnership of Deloitte & Touche. Amongst his clientele were medium and large national enterprises, mostly family held. In 1994, Hugo was assigned by Deloitte’s global head office to Deloitte & Touche Central and Eastern Europe, and he became chairman of Deloitte & Touche tax and legal affairs for this region (15 countries). From mid 1997, Hugo was chairman of Deloitte & Touche Amsterdam (The Netherlands).

In 1999, the Global Board of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu assigned Hugo to the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he held the position of director of the Emerging Market Leaders Programme and founder and director of the Technology Pioneers Programme. The latter covered the broader field of technology and aimed at establishing a linkage between CEO’s with world leaders. For this, Hugo selected and interviewed CEO’s ranking within the world top 1000 of companies and organised the corresponding programmes and hosted the meetings of CEO’s with political leaders and academia.

In 2000, Hugo became COO of the EMEA region of Network Appliance, a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer. He held this position until end of 2001. Since 2002, Hugo has been active in the establishment of a number of start-up companies, including Corgwell Group B.V.

Currently, Mr Van der Zee is active in a number of director, board and advisor positions:

• Corgwell Group; a broad advisory group (B.V., 10 companies) in the corporate and public governance field (co-founder; shareholder; statutory director until July 2006)
• Global Leaders Academy, a group that supports and nurtures a new generation of transformational leaders (foundation and B.V., co-founder)
• ARANDA Technologies, a start-up software engineering company
• Further, he is active as an advisor to family owned businesses