Matt Leech

Expertise

Matt specialises in all aspects of recovery, restructuring, turnaround and insolvency advice. He has extensive experience of advising businesses facing financial challenge, whether their own or in their supply chain and customer bases, as well as providing advice to directors on their personal duties. 

Matt also advises insolvency practitioners and fixed charge receivers on formal appointments, as well as secured and unsecured creditors on recovering debts. Matt is regularly instructed by lenders and funders to provide advice in relation to stressed and distressed borrowers. Matt also specialises in advice relating to distressed real estate lending.

Matt has previously undertaken secondments to Clydesdale Bank’s Strategic Business Services team, National Australia Bank’s Commercial Real Estate team and Royal Bank of Scotland’s Active Insolvency Management team and has a good working knowledge of lenders’ internal processes, procedures and requirements.

Matt is an accredited member of the Institute for Turnaround and sits on the IFT’s North-East committee. Matt is also an associate member (as advising solicitor) of NARA, the National Association of Fixed Charge Receivers, and has been recognised by the Legal 500 as a “Next Generation Partner”.

Experience

1. Advising a secured lender and insolvency practitioner appointees on a strategy utilising a combination of administration, agricultural receivership and fixed-charge receivership to de-gear and restructure a secured portfolio of property and assets across multiple large farming sites. The strategy successfully facilitated a solvent refinance and continued trading of the core business. 
2. Advising an Irish semi-state organisation in the solvent wind-down of its UK subsidiary operations, including asset realisation and options to satisfy liquidated and contingent claims to preserve solvency, including working closely with accountants from a Big-4 firm who provided the necessary financial advice.
3. Advising the joint administrators of a high-profile pay-day lender, including regulatory advice on the requirements of the Consumer Credit and Financial Services and Marketing Acts, as well as the Financial Conduct Authority, to enable the consumer debtor book to be realised and the business to be efficiently wound down in administration. 
4. Advising the fixed charge receivers, appointed with Court endorsement by the joint administrators of the secured lender, of a tenanted agricultural and residential holding of 2,500 acres which was eventually sold to the Crown Estate for a consideration of c£20m. 
5. Advising a private equity turnaround specialist in the acquisition of the business and assets of a high-profile national retailer through an accelerated M&A process, which included the transfer and preservation of 800 jobs across 70 sites.