Phil Merino

Phil Merino is the Controller for Olympusat. He is a highly motivated and experienced Financial Management Executive with over 25 years of experience with a wide range of roles and responsibilities in several industries.

Phil began a career in accounting with a small CPA firm in Chicago where he performed audit and tax work for local small and medium enterprises. He was then recruited to work as a Foreign Service Officer with the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Office of the Inspector General. While based in the US Embassy in Germany, he traveled extensively to Central and Eastern Europe to audit foreign assistance programs targeted to establish free market economics in the region. Among the more interesting projects, Phil worked on were the Russian Voucher Privatization Program; the establishment of the Moscow Stock Exchange; labor re-training in Poland; land redistribution in Bulgaria; defense conversion in the Czech Republic; agricultural assistance in Ukraine; citizenship initiatives in Estonia; and micro-funding in Romania. Phil completed his tenure at USAID by working as the Deputy Controller for USAID’s Poland office where he was a U.S. Treasury Accredited Certifying Officer. Phil spent the next seven years working in Poland as the Chief Financial Officer for Financial Services Limited, the back office of Poland’s largest mutual fund; Business Point, a private equity-backed outsource service provider carved out from Financial Services Limited; and BCH Communications, a strategically funded VoIP network service provider.

After ten years of living in Europe, Phil returned to the USA to work for Ernst & Young’s Latin America Center of Excellence in Miami where he provided business advisory services to the Latin American-based subsidiaries of US publicly traded companies such as Xerox, Honeywell, General Mills, Discovery Latin America, Occidental Petroleum, Coleman, and many others. After a brief stop at KPMG, Phil joined Teleperformance, the world’s largest and most successful Business Process Outsource (BPO) service provider as Audit Director where he was responsible for the internal controls for subsidiaries in North, Central, and South America, as well as Asia and Australia. After more than ten years of continuous and extensive intercontinental travel, Phil took on the role of Project Controller for Dragados USA, the prime (lead) contractor for the $1.8 billion I-595/SR84 project in Broward county, Florida where he was responsible for all financial matters. More recently, Phil worked as a consultant for local companies in south Florida and on projects in Mexico and Costa Rica for RSM (formerly McGladrey). Prior to joining Olympusat, Phil was Senior Controller for Queens Fort Capital.

After honorably serving in the US Army with the 82nd Airborne Division, Phil graduated from Southern Illinois University with a BS in Accounting and earned his CPA in 1989. He completed an MBA from Golden Gate University in 2007. Phil enjoys all types of fishing, tying fishing flies, and playing the guitar.