Tim Betts
Head of Business Restructuring, Partner
Our approach is entrepreneurial and multi-disciplinary. You will have access to the right expertise and technical knowhow for your specific needs and situation. Nonetheless, members of our team do specialise in the distinct areas of business restructuring so that they can offer the best advice possible.
Please use the links in the list below to find out more about the specific services we provide;
Restructuring Advisory and Insolvency
Our goal is to return your business to financial health and avoid formal insolvency whenever possible. Our Restructuring Advisory and Insolvency team has a proven record of accomplishment of stabilising businesses. We provide expert commercial advice to businesses and their investors, creditors and, if need be, courts, that aims to protect and maximise value for all.
Our clients range from UK-based SMEs to multi-billion dollar international groups. We will act quickly and collaboratively to help you achieve the right outcome whether from a turnaround or a formal insolvency process, if that is the best option.
Our range of services assists our clients across the whole restructuring life cycle.
Reviews
A key to a successful turnaround is having the right information and an accurate picture of you business’s position. You can rely on us to conduct the reviews of your situation that will help you make the right decisions. We regularly carry out Independent Business Reviews, cash/liquidity reviews, solvency reviews and monitoring and contingency planning for clients.
Advice
We also provide a range of advice on finance, restructuring, re-financing, strategic options, stakeholder engagement and value optimisation. This is where the industry and turnaround experience of our partner-led teams will deliver and maximise value.
Appointments
We are also regularly appointed to act in all forms of formal insolvency processes.
Creditor Services
Our Creditor Services team represents a number of clients including credit insurers, local authorities, debt purchasers, and other creditors. We assist and support them in maximising the recovery of their debts both before and during formal insolvency proceedings.
Our core services include:
- Advising our clients on insolvency related matters, including providing technical advice and support where appropriate
- Reviewing documentation produced by other Insolvency Practitioners relating to decision procedures and meetings, and advising our clients on their options to maximise recoveries.
- Lodging our clients’ claims and voting forms in formal insolvencies
- Representing our clients at creditors’ meetings, and on Creditors’ Committees, and advocating in their best interests
- Monitoring and collecting dividends for our client
Cross-border and Contentious Insolvency
BDO have a dedicated team of insolvency and forensic specialists with considerable experience of cross-border and contentious insolvency assignments. We work closely with lenders and creditors, lawyers, governments, regulators and other stakeholders to deliver robust and pragmatic strategies that will maximise recoveries.
Appointments
The Cross-border and Contentious Insolvency team focus on non-transactional appointments such as formal insolvency appointments arising under the Insolvency Act and similar appointments such as court appointed receiverships under the Senior Courts Act. We take appointments deriving from both UK and foreign legislation.
These assignments often demand a team with extensive international reach. We work with specialists from across the BDO International network, particularly for offshore insolvency appointments where a local appointee may be required.
Litigation is often the biggest potential asset within an insolvent estate. Our team has extensive experience in managing the funding and pursuit of litigation to maximise returns to creditors. This includes obtaining freezing orders and other interim relief, pursuing officeholder remedies such as antecedent transactions and misfeasance, pursuing claims of civil and commercial fraud and pursuing breach of contract claims.
Asset tracing and enforcement
Formal insolvency appointments can often involve the use of forensic investigations and litigation to identify claims, trace assets and support the enforcement and recovery of court judgments and arbitration awards.
Expert witness
Members of the team also act as expert witnesses in insolvency-related cases, including disciplinary matters and professional negligence.
INSOL International
The team are attending the INSOL Channel Islands Seminar and have produced a helpful flyer, click here for more details.
Pensions Covenant Advisory
Our Pensions Covenant Advisory team includes both financial advisers and actuaries with significant experience advising in respect of defined benefit schemes sponsored by businesses in financial distress. Senior members of our team are licenced insolvency practitioners with experience gained on secondment to the Pension Protection Fund and major banks. We have worked on many high profile pension-restructuring cases in recent years.
We act for a wide range of clients including pension scheme trustees and sponsors, vendors, acquirer’s trade unions, regulators and other pension stakeholders.
We also provide a full range of pensions covenant advisory services in business as usual situations.
Pensions and restructuring
Successful restructuring situations involving defined benefit pension schemes require significant experience of the regulatory landscape. Our Pensions Restructuring team comprises highly experienced members of our business restructuring and pensions advisory team all of whom have extensive pensions restructuring experience. We provide you with advice in respect of RAAs, CVAs, PPF plus compromises, support through accelerated M&A processes, and help our clients manage communications with key pension stakeholders.
Pensions and transactions
Early engagement between the employer and pension stakeholders is key to effectively managing the pension obligations through re-financings, business disposals and reorganisations. We help our clients understand the pensions-related impact of transactions on the pension scheme through the planning, execution and post transaction phases. This typically involves us assessing the impact of the transaction, assessing appropriate mitigation and supporting our clients through negotiations with other key stakeholders.
Pensions, regulation and disputes
Transactions and financial distress frequently lead to regulatory intervention and disputes. We advise clients impacted through initial analysis of the facts, support through negotiations, prepare formal submissions and reports and act as expert witnesses.
Special Situations M&A
Transactions involving businesses facing business critical or challenging circumstances can vary significantly from traditional M&A processes. The objectives, timescales, risks and primary stakeholders can vary, along with key drivers of value. Delivering transactions in often complex and time constrained circumstances requires specialist skills blending both corporate finance and restructuring knowledge.
Our dedicated Special Situations M&A team are experts in supporting businesses that find themselves in financial stress or distress to deliver transactions in the most optimal way.
Our team will work with you to plan, design and implement an effective and dynamic solution that we will drive forward to enable you to focus on the day to day running of your business. You can draw on our experience of similar situations to help you manage crucial communications with key stakeholders.
You will be working with a team that specialise in and understand your sectors and markets. This sector knowledge, together with our relationships and extensive contacts in investor markets, enables us to generate a broad range of credible interested parties for your business.
The range of services our Special Situations M&A team covers include:
- Accelerated M&A
- Monitoring/review of third-party sale processes
- Stressed acquisition support
- Accelerated funding solutions
- Non-standard and complex M&A
- Options and Contingency Planning
You can review our extensive list of credentials here.
To discuss how we can help your business, please contact Amar Patel.
Corporate Simplification
We understand the challenges faced by businesses resulting from structures that are no longer fit for purpose or that contain redundant entities.
Maintaining entities, whether dormant or active and undertaking duplicated activities, is expensive and incurs wasted management time. This is a particular challenge with the growing burden of regulation and the need to continually manage legislative changes.
Complex structures can attract negative publicity, corporate governance concerns, displeased shareholders and increase the cost of capital. The loss of corporate memory can create personal and business risk for boards, particularly in acquisitive groups.
A corporate simplification project can reduce costs and free-up capital by eliminating dividend blocks and mitigate risk, thereby reducing corporate governance concerns and negative publicity. It can also help firms manage changes in regulation and ensure its corporate structure is fit for purpose for tax and transfer pricing purposes.
When undertaking a transaction, corporate simplification can also help simplify sell side due diligence and maximise value in a divestment. Post-acquisition, the elimination of redundant holding companies, dormant entities and duplicated activities can help maximise the value of an acquisition.
Our dedicated Corporate Simplification team specialises in helping you address issues of complexity, whether by eliminating dormant companies that are no longer required or undertaking a strategic redesign of the group structure encompassing active and holding companies. We can provide project management advice and support as well as technical advice to ensure your project is efficient, successful and has sustainable benefits.
Our specialist Licensed Insolvency Practitioners are experts at dealing with the solvent liquidations of corporate entities and fund structures including limited liability partnerships and corporate general partners of limited partnerships. They also act as liquidators of listed companies and in the realisation and reconstruction of listed funds.
We can also advise you on how to efficiently exit a non-core business either on a standalone basis or followed by an appointment as liquidators. A carefully planned exit is critical to managing reputational and financial risk as well as maximising the return to investors.
In providing our services for foreign entities we can draw on the BDO international network with sector and technical experts in all key regions and countries.
We will work with you to:
- Plan - understand each entity and identify any potential obstacles to its elimination
- Review – analyse your existing corporate structure
- Rationalise - consider the relative merits of dissolution versus a solvent liquidation
- Implement - support you in implementing the required strategy and achieving success
Drivers for Corporate Simplification:
- Cost reduction
- Regulation
- Transparency and corporate governance
- Risk management
- Tax and transfer pricing
- Transactions
For examples of how we have helped our clients please click here.
Personal Insolvency
Our Personal Insolvency team works with individuals in financial distress and their creditors.
Formal Personal Insolvency Appointments
Our services include:
- Bankruptcy Appointments (England & Wales)
- Sequestration Appointments (Scotland)
In formal appointments, our goal is to maximise recoveries for creditors. We use our statutory powers under the legislation to conduct investigations to identify and realise assets as well as to overturn asset protection schemes and prior transactions where individuals have concealed assets. We are tenacious, pragmatic and commercial in our pursuit of assets to return value to creditors.
- Bespoke Individual Voluntary Arrangements (‘IVAs’) (England & Wales)
- Protected Trust Deeds (Scotland)
Where individuals seek to avoid the consequences that follow from bankruptcy or sequestration, as it may affect their ability to practice or to trade, we work with them to seek a formal compromise of their debts through an IVA or a Protected Trust Deed.
Creditors should receive a better financial return from these procedures than from an individual’s formal insolvency, so ensuring a more advantageous outcome for both the individual debtor and their creditors.
We have a proven track record in assisting individuals to reach mutually acceptable settlements with their creditors.
Private Client Debt Advisory
Our Private Client Debt Advisory service supports individuals experiencing an unexpected challenge to their personal finances to reach a negotiated solution with their creditors and avoid insolvency.
Examples of trigger events:
- Calls on Personal Guarantees
- Threatened or actual enforcement action from a creditor
- Demand for repayment from HM Revenue & Customs which cannot be met
- Unexpected reduction in income and cash calls
- Devaluation of a significant asset
- Judgments obtained in civil litigation
We work with individuals, and their professional advisors, to review the options available and develop a strategy to engage with creditors and other stakeholders.
We undertake an impartial and objective review of the individual’s financial circumstances based on full and frank disclosure. Our review is robust and credible and allows the individuals and stakeholders to engage and negotiate from a fully informed position and to reach a consensual resolution.
The team draw on the broad expertise and knowledge of the Private Client Services team.
Operational improvement and effectiveness
We work very closely with the Value Creation Team to help clients to improve EBITDA and cash flow, working capital and overall performance that enables a business to turnaround its situation in challenging times.
Operational improvement includes:
- Revenue, pricing and growth strategies
- operational performance diagnostics
- procurement savings
- performance benchmarking
- target operating model design
- transformation planning and implementation
- programme office support
Working capital advisory includes:
- short term cash flow forecasting
- variance reporting
- liquidity management tactics
- crisis cash management
- interim CFO support
Business turnaround includes:
- planning
- CRO/Advisor
- Strategic options assessments
- lenders, equity and stakeholder negotiation,
- debt restructuring
- refinancing
- managed exit