Business Resilience Hub
Business Resilience Hub
During times of financial and operational challenges, business owners may require additional and responsive support from professionals that understand the exact needs of their business.
To help business owners who are looking to access up-to-date information, we have created a Business Resilience Hub. Here, Directors and Shareholders of SMEs can access relevant articles to help build awareness, mitigate business challenges, and help their business through a crisis.
Within the Group, our specialist divisions are ideally positioned to help businesses navigate their way through any challenge. Our support and resources help businesses when considering how to mitigate, prepare, respond and recover; pre, mid and post crisis, helping you to remain resilient throughout.
Speak to Opus
If you have concerns about an aspect of your business and would like to speak to a Partner or Director at Opus, we can arrange for a non-obligatory and confidential call. Please call 0203 995 6380 or email support@opusllp.com to arrange this.
Insight & Advisory Articles
What does insolvency mean for Retention of Title rights?
Retention of Title (RoT) is essentially a credit risk management tool, designed to protect the supplier from bad debts. The supplier just wants to get paid and rarely has any real desire to get involved in the disruption of taking back and re-selling their goods, but RoT provides a lever with which to apply pressure for the bill to be settled. The question is: what happens if the buyer files for insolvency?
What happens when Directors misbehave?
When directors misbehave the consequences can be swift and severe. Ignorance is no defence when it comes to directors’ duties. In this article, we explore two court rulings which lift the lid on some of the real-world misbehaviour that gets Directors into serious trouble.
The perils of overtrading
For many years, growth has been an overriding objective for the majority of UK businesses. Winning a big new contract, gaining a major new customer or successfully launching a new product or service are all events to be celebrated. Increased sales are an unchallenged positive. But if that expansion is unsustainable and worst of all, unplanned, it can be at the expense of profitability and a cause of sharply increased financial risk. Overtrading is one of the major causes of business failure.
Creditor pressure on struggling businesses
When the economic outlook darkens, suppliers and service providers know that credit risks increase and the prospect of bad debts hitting their bottom-line profits looms ever larger. The canny operators will be trying ever harder to avoid losses altogether, or at least to mitigate the damage. Unsurprisingly in the current uncertain business environment, more and more creditors are willing to use the courts to collect overdue debts via the Winding Up Petition route, which is the final destination on the creditor enforcement journey.
What does disqualification mean for a Company Director?
Anyone acting as a Company Director must carry on the Company’s business in a ‘proper’ manner, which in practice means complying with their Fiduciary Duties. This can best be summarised as putting the interests of their Company and its shareholders first.
Directors have a range of duties and responsibilities, which are intended to make sure that the Company’s best interests and its success are their overriding priority, as well as discouraging any conduct designed to benefit Directors or third parties personally to the detriment of the Company.
What is a Shadow Director and what are the legal implications
The concept of a ‘Shadow Director’ is generally only relevant when a Company is financially threatened and most often when it goes into a formal insolvency procedure, such as Liquidation or Administration. Otherwise, the issue might arise in the case of inbound litigation against a Company and its Directors or enforcement action by its regulators.
In the wider context of the corporate governance of a business, the existence of one or more Shadow Directors can create a range of problems. One way or another, understanding the implications and potential downsides of Shadow Directorship is essential for Companies, shareholders, advisers, managers, insurers and a wide range of other stakeholders.
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