201504 CM April

INTERVIEW
THE SINGING
DETECTIVE
Sean Feast caught up with the outgoing President
of R3 and reflects upon a busy time for the insolvency
profession.
THERE is something about the
insolvency profession, and
investigation work in particular, that
has excited Giles Frampton from
the beginning. He sees it as a challenge:
“Finding out what happened, why it
happened, and where the money went is a
rewarding intellectual exercise,” he explains.
“I have been involved in cases where
the behaviour of individuals has been so
strange, and so unbelievable, that even
now I am disinclined to say more. Both as
an investigating accountant, and as an IP,
you will always be alert to fraud, but for
everyone who is caught, there must be
many others who simply get away with it.”
It would be wrong to say that Giles
‘fell’ into accountancy, or insolvency, but
it would be equally misleading to suggest
it was part of a grand plan. As the son
of a naval officer, born in St George’s
Hospital at Hyde Park Corner, Giles lived
the peripatetic life familiar to all children
born of Service parents: “Name a county on
the south coast and I have probably lived
there,” he jokes.
After schooling in Nottingham and
Chester (his father had worked for Rolls
Royce for a time, giving the young Giles
his first experience of receivership) he
won a place to study Philosophy, Politics
and Economics at Christ Church, Oxford,
a contemporary of Howard Goodall CBE,
the English composer, and the MP David
Willetts among others. He remembers it as
a happy time, not least because it gave him
the chance to indulge in his great passion.
Music.
“I enjoyed Oxford very much,” he says.
“Most of my time was spent playing my
violin and singing, although I did do just
enough work to get a second!”
It was while he was at University,
however, that he first became interested
in accountancy: “As a young man I
always wanted to be a lawyer but my
plans changed,” he says. “I opted for
PPE because it interested me. Then in
my second year I spent six weeks at the
accountants Peat Marwick Mitchell in
Birmingham and was fascinated by it all.
These were the days when sales ledgers
were enormous books with inked entries
in green, blue and red, and you had to
remember which colour to use for that
year's audit.”
While he was there, he helped to
uncover a fraud, discovering an invoice for
£25,000 ‘for services supplied’ but no other
detail. It was the start of an interest that has
sustained a career for more than 30 years.
Giles went down (in the Oxbridge
parlance) in 1979, determined to become
an accountant: “I knew I did not want
to enter academia and wanted to earn
some money,” he jokes. “I knew that a
qualification was important, and saw with
accountancy that it opened the door to
a world of opportunity. I also recognised
later in life (at the risk of upsetting any
careers masters) that you don’t need to
do an accountancy degree to become
an accountant. Indeed you probably
shouldn’t!”
Giles trained as a Chartered Accountant
with Thomson McLintock, and joined the
Plymouth office of Peat Marwick Mitchell
in 1984 to focus on insolvency work. (“I
came in with the 1986 Act!”) His first
major insolvency case was the Berkeley
Applegate liquidation, one that is still cited
in case law on a regular basis. He obtained
his insolvency licence in 1989 and became
a Partner in what had then become KPMG
in 1991, before teaming up three years
later with a former Grant Thornton Partner,
Richard Smith, to form Richard J Smith &
Co, specialising solely in corporate and
personal insolvency work and in forensic
accounting .
One of his most challenging – and
personally rewarding – cases concerned
the liquidation of Ford Park Cemetery.
The business responsible for running the
12
April 2015 www.cicm.com
The recognised standard in credit management