Parabis founding partners Tim Oliver and Tim Roberts each received £16.9m one month after the firm’s 2012 £50m investment deal with private equity house Duke Street, The Lawyer can reveal.
Oliver and Roberts were each paid £11.5m for their goodwill in Parabis Law LLP. The pair also received £505,000 and £4.86m for their stakes in Parabis Limited and Parabis Holdings respectively.
Speaking to The Lawyer Oliver said: “The accounting for the transaction was particularly complicated but a considerable sum was reinvested back in to the business to fund acquisitions.”
Oliver declined to comment when asked to specify how much of the funds were reinvested in the firm.
Parabis made history in 2012 when it became the first law firm to receive backing from a private equity company. Before Parabis entered administration Duke Street injected a further £13m into the firm to fund infrastructure updates such as improvements to property, technology, and hiring. In November it emerged that the private equity house had written down its €30m (£21.4m) investment in the business to zero.
Regulatory changes and high levels of borrowing led to Parabis entering pre-pack administration in November. The administration led to the firm being broken up and sold in a series of deals valued at £50m. The deals saved most of the 2,000 jobs at the group.
Parabis’ defendant law practice, Plexus Law, was subsequently sold to Roberts and co-founder Andrew McDougal. Oliver is now listed as a director of Argent Health & Safety Limited, which is a former subsidiary of Parabis.
In May 2015 Parabis launched its second redundancy consultation in under a year, which affected 80 legal secretaries and support staff and 10 lawyers across Plexus Law.
The redundancies were part of measures to cut costs at the firm, which also included closing the firm’s Croydon-based pre-litigation department, leading to 24 redundancies. The firm also closed its Bristol and Colchester offices in a move hat affected 41 legal and administrative support staff.
For more on Parabis, read this week’s cover story, Parabis Collapse: Lessons learned