Chartering success for Air Partner

Our Forensics team helps you to protect your business value, emerging stronger from unplanned events, including fraud, economic crime, crisis and third party risk. We work with our clients to prepare for and recover from crises, with a focus on enhancing their ability to learn and improve following unplanned events.

We had the opportunity to support Air Partner earlier this year, following the discovery of a significant financial misstatement. Combining human insight with technology innovation, we were able to respond quickly, working closely with Air Partner to solve this important problem.   

“Everyone who worked on this project had full-unrestricted access to any part of the organisation. The review asked for detailed answers to complex questions and though putting it behind us quickly was important, we had to get those answers, in order to emerge as a strong and clean organisation as a result. The review has been extremely thorough and carried out in a professional and timely manner due to the technology used which ensured our review objectives were met.”

Mark Briffa, CEO, Air Partner

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3:13

Fran Marwood

Transcript

Air Partner are pioneers in the air charter business. They’ve been doing that since the 1960s.  They’ve got clients - everyone from government to rock stars - and they’ve been moving people and cargo around the world since that time.  They’ve build up an excellent reputation globally, won lots of awards, but earlier this year, the client suffered from a fairly large accounting misstatement.

We knew the client and we went out to see them to talk about the issue.  We were able to build trust with them that we had the right people and the right technology to address the issue. And more importantly, I think, that we were able to combine those in an innovative way to help the client get to the bottom of the matter.

Once the matter was discovered and announced to the markets, it’s natural that stakeholder confidence took a tumble, so the share price fell and key to that was addressing the issue and showing to the markets that the matter was being dealt with in a robust and professional manner. And I think that’s why it was important that the client could show that they had a team like ours in place.

So on Forensic projects, technology is always front and centre and, on this project, we needed to cover a large amount of ground and cover it quickly.  We used a tool that we’ve developed called GL Analyser which allows us to look at transactions and themes within those transactions, covering a lot of numbers but getting to the messages very, very quickly. We’ve developed that in-house over the last year and that was really important in the approach that we used to get through the volume that we needed to in the timescales that we had to.

So, on projects like this, it’s important to get a breadth of skills to cover off all the angles. We had a team that included tech-enabled forensic accountants, we had data analytics specialists and we had financial controls experts.  So by applying a transparent, independent and expert approach, we were able to help the client move through the issue and get to a point where they were able to rebuild their stakeholder confidence.

There were a number of stakeholders on the project and good communications were really important. We built some great relationships along the way and it was really nice at the end of the project to get the feedback from the client.  They’d loved our technology, they loved our robust approach, they really appreciated the timeliness and speed with which we got through the issues and that was great to hear for myself and the rest of the team who’d put in a massive amount of effort.

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