A former boss of the consultancy firm BCG is being drafted in to chair one of Britain’s biggest auditors by its new private equity backers.
Sky News has learnt that Stuart Quickenden, who is now a senior advisor to BCG in the UK, will be named chairman of Grant Thornton UK in an announcement expected on Friday.
His appointment will come nearly nine months after Grant Thornton’s UK partners voted to approve the sale of a majority stake in the firm to Cinven, the buyout firm.
The deal, which was understood to value the accountancy firm at about £1.5bn, formed part of a rush of deals in the professional services sector.
Mr Quickenden has a strong pedigree in the industry, and now also serves as chairman of Octopus Investments, a backer of myriad early-stage companies.
Grant Thornton UK sits just below the ranks of the big four audit firms, a group comprising Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
In its last financial year, Grant Thornton’s roughly 250 UK partners earned average pay packets of £682,000.
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The firm audits a number of FTSE-350 companies, while its restructuring division is the administrator to Greensill Capital, which is involved in the liquidation of Sanjeev Gupta’s Speciality Steels UK.
A string of deals has taken place in recent months across the professional services sector, including AlixPartners raising new debt financing in an oversubscribed deal and MHA – the UK arm of Baker Tilly – floating on the London Stock Exchange.
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Cinven declined to comment on Thursday.
