One of essentially the most outstanding figures in Britain’s skilled providers business is lining up personal fairness backing for a £1.5bn provide for the accountancy agency he co-founded.
Sky News understands that John Connolly, the previous chief government of Deloitte’s UK agency, is working with TowerBrook Capital Partners and Warburg Pincus on a bid for Azets.
Mr Connolly, who chairs a lot of privately held companies, together with the TowerBrook-backed US accounting agency Eisner Advisory Group, can also be the previous chairman of the FTSE-100 firms Amec Foster Wheeler and G4S.
He based Cogital Group, which later turned Azets, in 2016, however stepped down following an earlier sale course of in 2019.
City sources stated he regarded Azets as “unfinished business” and was anticipated to entrance a severe provide for the corporate.
Hg, the personal fairness agency, has employed funding bankers at JP Morgan to supervise an public sale of Azets, though a course of is unlikely to get underway till subsequent yr.
Bankers regard a worth vary of between £1.2bn and £1.5bn as practical.
Azets claims to be the most important supplier of business-critical providers akin to accounting work, payroll and tax to small and medium-sized companies in northern Europe.
In complete, it boasts greater than 100,000 SME prospects.
The firm trades underneath a lot of manufacturers, together with Blick Rothenberg, which shaped a part of a 2016 merger that noticed Hg change into a shareholder within the enterprise.
Since then, it has made a string of acquisitions to bolster its presence in a number of international locations.
The group’s rebranding underneath the Azets title happened in 2020.
Preparations for a sale are going down in opposition to a backdrop of accelerating structural change within the accountancy world, with EY proposing a world separation of its audit and consulting companies.
Mr Connolly couldn’t be reached for touch upon Tuesday.
Source: information.sky.com”