It is with the greatest sadness that Opus Business Advisory Group has to announce the loss of one of its founding Partners, Steve Parker, who passed away unexpectedly on 7th April 2024.
Steve was one of the genuinely good guys – a top class IP, an astute businessman and a kind and caring person, who was an inspiration to all who had the privilege to work with him.
He was one of the profession’s real characters and will be greatly missed by all of his colleagues at Opus and the many others in and around the insolvency world who knew him and enjoyed his company at work or at play. You couldn’t not have fun around him, even at difficult moments, with his wonderful sense of humour, the twinkle in his eye and that infectious chuckle.
His insolvency career started at Leonard Curtis & Partners in 1984, learning at the feet of David Gray and Leonard Curtis himself, mainly busy with challenging but rewarding trading Receiverships.
He moved on in 1990 to work with Geoffrey Pollard’s firm in Edgeware, which focused on Liquidations, adding another quiver to his experience bow.
By 1993 he had become a Senior Manager at Latham Crossley & Davis, working under Peter Dunn. Lathams went through a series of re-inventions, merging with Clark Whitehill and then being acquired by Tenon Recovery, now known as RSM UK.
Steve passed his insolvency exams in 1998, becoming an appointment-taking Director (Partner) at Tenon Recovery in 2000.
From 2004, Steve drove forward the Tenon (London and South East) Restructuring and Insolvency division alongside Trevor Binyon, Tim Dolder, Jo Rolls and Colin Wilson. During this time, Steve was involved with a number of complex assignments, notably including the Administration of Cooks the Bakery, a multi-site Retail operation, which was successfully sold, securing hundreds of jobs.
In 2013, he and his Tenon colleagues Trevor, Tim, Jo and Colin set up Opus Restructuring, which has grown in just over a decade to fourteen offices and over one hundred Partners and staff.
Steve had a simple working ethos. He was there to help and support financially-troubled businesses and individuals and to get the best possible outcome no matter how difficult that might turn out to be.
With such a long and varied career, war stories abound, many of which are best remembered and cherished but not made public. Nevertheless, not many IPs can have fallen asleep on the London Underground with a gold bar neatly packaged in brown paper on their lap. Steve’s justification ever afterwards was that he didn’t know what was in the parcel until he unwrapped it later.
One of his favourite cases was the successful rescue of the iconic Troubadour music venue in 2015, which had hosted some of the world’s best-loved musicians since it opened in 1954, including Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Elton John, Elvis Costello, Ed Sheeran and Adele. The venue remains a vivid presence on the London live music scene.
Steve was also the lead IP from 2018 onwards in the first insolvency of a crypto currency exchange, an extremely complex multinational case involving many strands of forensic investigation and asset tracing, which continues to this day.