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Colum Bancroft is a Partner and Managing Director and Head of the Risk Advisory practice in Asia at AlixPartners, and is based in Hong Kong. He helps clients to better identify, mitigate and respond to serious risk and compliance issues.
Applying 35 years of financial, commercial, and forensic accounting experience, Colum assists clients to better protect against, respond to, and recover from challenging situations that have significant regulatory, reputational, or financial implications such as fraud, corruption, data breach, money laundering and sanctions, and complex commercial disputes.
Based in Asia for 30 years and a former partner at a global accounting firm, he then managed a group of China-focused companies before establishing and building the Asia financial investigations practice for a global risk consultancy.
Colum has a degree with First Class Honors in economics from the University of Leeds in England, is a fellow of both the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (FCA) and the Hong Kong Institute of Certified Public Accountants (CPA), and has been a practicing member of the Academy of Experts (UK) since 2009.
Key Engagements:
- Conducted hundreds of forensic accounting and compliance reviews in China, throughout Asia and globally, involving conflicts of interest and other corruption issues, information and asset misappropriation, accounting irregularities and financial statement manipulation.
- Led FCPA forensic reviews in multiple jurisdictions and sectors, including telecoms, oil & gas, construction, property, power generation, aircraft and automotive, pharmaceutical and healthcare, industrials and manufacturing, and financial services.
- Appointed by the Audit Committees of numerous China-based, US-listed companies to perform an independent review of alleged financial reporting and corporate governance irregularities, and/or perform compliance reviews, following the issuance of short seller reports.
- Retained by a US-listed company to review the post-acquisition international business of its Chinese subsidiary and identify and quantify transactions with sanctioned countries, for the purpose of OFAC self-reporting.
- Performed multiple assignments for the independent compliance monitors of top-tier global banks tasked with evaluating the respective banks’ progress in enhancing their AML and sanctions compliance programs and reporting progress to relevant regulators.
- Frequently retained as an accounting expert and has testified in both Hong Kong court and international arbitration proceedings.