RBS and GRG in the BBC news again.
Shock horror! Apparently, according to the BBC, RBS admit they lied about GRG. I lied admitted RBS boss Ross McEwan to the Treasury Select Committee on Tuesday of this week the report claims. His statement in 2014 that GRG had helped most of its business customers was apparently wrong. Not just a little wrong but […]
Carillion’s demise puts the Big Four in the spotlight again
Yesterday, a feisty joint meeting of the Work & Pensions Committee and the Business Committee saw MPs training their crosshairs on the Big Four accounting firms. Frank Field, the chair of the Work and Pensions committee, went so far as to call for, “an end to the oligopoly that exists between accounting firms” and said […]
Early restructuring and a second chance for entrepreneurs
Headlined as a modern approach to business insolvency (a.k.a. Chapter 11 plus), the long-awaited EU proposal on business restructuring is every turnaround manager’s dream come true; an early Christmas present and wishes fulfilled beyond expectation. Having spent over 15 years banging on about consensual pre-insolvency restructuring saving enterprise value for creditors and jobs for employees […]
RBS to pay back £400 million for GRG’s “serious failings” but this will be no consolation to the owners of the businesses they destroyed.
RBS has set aside a £400 million fund for a complaints scheme to return complex and opaque fees wrongfully charged to 4,000 of the 12,000 companies, many of which were forced into insolvency, that were handled by the bank’s discredited Global Restructuring Group (GRG) between 2008 and 2013. This follows the publishing of preliminary findings […]
What can we really learn from RBS’s GRG horror story?
Information leaked this week sheds more light on the murky RBS GRG story. Internal RBS documents appear to have encouraged the provocation of healthy businesses into default condition from where extortionate fees were charged, external independent property valuations overridden by internal valuations and properties sold into an RBS property company to be sold later at […]
A new rescue culture on the cards
At the end of May 2016 the UK Government’s Insolvency Service published a proposal for innovative new legislation to improve the UK’s business rescue culture. A six-week consultation period ended on 6th July. The full consultation document can be found here: Insolvency Service Proposal May 2016 There are essentially four major strands to the proposal: […]
London Schemes industry set back? Are we about to see an end to aggressive “schemes forum shopping”.
An extraordinary coincidence of timing at the International Restructuring Conference in London today. Global Turnaround Editor, John Willcock’s informative market update featured “London’s Scheme Industry keeps on rolling” as a keynote topic. He pointed out the recent COMI shift objections in the Codere and Indah Kiat cases to what the Court described in Codere as […]
Closing the NPL bid offer gap
For over 4 years the talk has been about the €1 trillion and rising of European NPL’s and the opportunity for the restructuring profession, but painfully little progress has been made, particularly in the corporate distressed loan sector. Portfolio offerings have been short on the depth of information buyers need to commit their money and […]
Carts and Horses
Interesting document from Insol Europe Turnaround Wing to its members on guidelines for Restructuring Professionals in consensual restructurings. It introduces the concept of Restructuring and Turnaround Professionals (RTP); restructuring being defined as balance sheet restructuring and turnaround being operational turnaround. Now isn’t that putting the cart before the horse? A trained turnaround professional stabilizes the […]
Another Update on GRG
Latest news is that the FCA review will not now be published until the end of 2015. This is the third delay and I wouldn’t be surprised if it drags on into 2016 or beyond. No reasons have been given but I suspect this is the process referred to as “Maxwellisation”. This is the process […]
