A Swiss-based personal fairness investor is among the many suitors circling a fast-growing accountancy agency based by the previous boss of Deloitte’s UK operations.
Sky News understands that Partners Group is in talks to purchase a controlling stake in Azets, one of many UK’s prime 10 accountants by income.
Partners is known to be one in every of a number of bidders which have made it by to the second spherical of an public sale being run by bankers at JP Morgan.
However, John Connolly, Azets’ founder, is known to have dropped out of the method after a bid he was engaged on with the buyout agency Towerbrook Capital Partners did not progress.
Mr Connolly, the previous chief government of Deloitte UK, based Cogital Group, which later grew to become Azets, in 2016, however stepped down following an earlier sale course of in 2019.
He additionally chairs the TowerBrook-backed US accounting agency Eisner Advisory Group, and beforehand chaired the FTSE-100 firms Amec Foster Wheeler and G4S.
The present public sale of Azets, which is majority-owned by Hg, can be stated to have seen curiosity from Apax Partners and PAI Partners, in line with market sources.
Azets claims to be the most important supplier of business-critical companies akin to accounting work, payroll and tax to small and medium-sized companies in northern Europe.
In whole, it boasts greater than 100,000 SME clients.
The firm trades underneath various manufacturers, together with Blick Rothenberg, which fashioned 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.
On Thursday, it introduced the acquisition of Naylor Wintersgill, a Yorkshire-based accountancy and enterprise advisory observe.
The deal was Azets’ eleventh in a yr.
The group’s rebranding underneath the Azets identify passed off in 2020.
None of these concerned within the course of would remark.
Source: information.sky.com”