Merry Christmas

We would live to wish all of our valued clients and partners a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Edinburgh Insolvency Discussion Group

Antonia McIntyre, an MLM Director attended Wednesday evening's talk for the Edinburgh Insolvency Discussion Group, which was presented by Alasdair Baijal of BBM Solicitors,  who discussed the impact of the Bribery Act 2010 on Insolvency Practitioners.  Alisdair provides some useful hints and tips to help IP's avoid falling foul of the legislation! Contact Alasdair at agb@bbmsolicitors.co.uk if you have any questions for him! He loves to be put on the spot!!

Personal insolvency within the Finance, Employment and Sustainable Growth portfolio

Our new, majority, SNP government has been in place for 5 months now.  One of the more interesting allocations – well, interesting to the insolvency community at least – is that while Mr Fergus Ewing retained responsibility for the development of policy and law in personal insolvency, this is now being developed under the umbrella of Mr Swinney’s Finance, Employment and Sustainable Growth Portfolio.  Mr Ewing is responsible for Energy, Enterprise and Tourism.

Perhaps strangely, in shifting responsibility from the Justice portfolio to Sustainable Growth, the new SNP government paralleled the position in the Westminster parliament, where responsibility for all aspects of insolvency lies with the Department for Business, Enterprise and Skills. Perhaps this is a sign of a maturing Scottish Government, a government not afraid to acknowledge where Westminster has actually got things right.  But has it?

The positioning of Bankruptcy within the Enterprise portfolio in England and Wales is a bit of a hangover from  Mr Mandelson’s love affair with all things American in the insolvency arena. The reforms he put in place, actualised in the provisions of the Enterprise Act 2003, were based on the premise that entrepreneurism could only thrive if it were supported by a ‘friendly’ or ‘soft’ insolvency regime (amongst other things of course).  However, our colleagues south of the border recognised very quickly that personal insolvency has very little association with entrepreneurism or even self employment.  It is all about consumerism.

So, would it not be more mature of the Scottish Government to recognise the error of Westminster’s ways and move Personal Insolvency back into the Justice portfolio and concentrate on developing a fully internally coherent regime for Scotland’s consumer debtors?  Or, if our government genuinely believes that Personal Insolvency belongs in Mr Ewing’s Enterprise portfolio, why not spend some time developing a workable insolvency solution for all our hard working joiners, electricians, publicans and so on – a Scottish version of the English Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA), rather than waste time on further watering down the rights of creditors in the existing regime?

Business Rescue and Recovery - Strategic Partnerships

One of the frustrations of being an insolvency practitioner is that, although we have a set of tools which allow us to help distressed businesses, people approach us when the situation has become critical and our options are very limited.

Why don’t people get in touch sooner?  Well, I suppose most of us would be upset if the undertaker turned up at the door when we thought we simply had a bad cold.  At MLM, we want to get the message out that we really are here to help.  So we’re joining with some like minded people, all of whom are committed to Scottish business, to make sure we’re armed with more than just insolvency restructuring tools.  We’ve got part time Financial Directors, turnaround specialists, HR people who can help you manage a downsizing and we’re meeting on the 28^th of this month to plan how we can make harassed company directors more aware of what we can do for them.  Watch this space

Rebranding MLM

MLM is tired of the bad press that insolvency practitioners often get. We didn’t want to be seen as ‘corporate undertakers’ or, even worse, vultures!  We really believe that the insolvency profession can add value both to the economy at national level and to individual businesses facing difficulties – and, let’s face it, there’s quite a lot of them about just now.

So we thought about how we could tell people that we are truly committed to finding practical and workable solutions for owner managed businesses. We started by rebranding ourselves as MLM Solutions. And then we started putting together a network of strategic partners who all know what it’s like to run a business.  We didn’t want partners who had skills they learned in books.  We wanted people who had actual experience of running businesses.  People like us who know what it’s like to manage cash flow and find new work.  People we like working with and people we know have the same commitment to their customers as we do.  So now we have partners who can provide Financial Directors or interim financial managers to manage your through a sticky spot.  We can put you in touch with someone who can help you re negotiate the terms of your commercial lease.  For development sites, we’re working with a project manager who has worked on major infrastructure projects in Qatar as well as commercial property developments in Scotland.  We can even help find funding for a business which may have some issues just now but which has real potential for growth.  We’re really excited about these developments and would love to get your feedback.