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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 Information understands that Companions Group is in talks to purchase a controlling stake in Azets, one of many UK’s high 10 accountants by income.
Companions is known to be one in every of a number of bidders which have made it by way of to the second spherical of an public sale being run by bankers at JP Morgan.
Nonetheless, 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 Companions 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 corporations 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 Companions and PAI Companions, in keeping with market sources.
Azets claims to be the biggest 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 corporate trades beneath a variety of manufacturers, together with Blick Rothenberg, which shaped a part of a 2016 merger that noticed Hg turn 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 beneath the Azets identify passed off in 2020.
None of these concerned within the course of would remark.
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