AlixPartners announced that along with Co-operative Group colleagues and other advisers, it received the Financial Restructuring Award at the annual Institute for Turnaround Awards in London, for its successful work in assisting the Co-operative Group.

AlixPartners worked in close cooperation with company management and other advisers (including Allen & Overy, Deloitte, KPMG, Tulchan, Rothschild, HSBC, Linklaters, PwC and UBS) in order to help the group to recapitalize its financial services business, the Co-operative Bank, through a debt-for-equity swap before separating the two entities, so as to enable both to regain a stable financial footing. The £1.5 billion recapitalization operation was delivered within the tight timeframe of just six months. AlixPartners project-managed 13 interdependent workstreams relating to the recapitalization and separation of the Bank from the Co-operative Group while also advising on negotiations with multiple parties, including the Group’s banking syndicate and pension schemes.

The Co-operative Group is fully owned and run by its 8 million members &mdash’ the largest organization of this kind in the UK. Evolving over a period of 150 years, the Co-operative Group developed out of the merger of cooperatively run wholesale and independent companies to become a major national retailer with a diverse range of businesses (food, financial services, funeral care, legal services and online electricals) and employing more than 100,000 people across the UK. After the injection of capital, the bank was put in a position to focus on its core business and divest non-core assets, while the group has refocused on its grocery-retail, funeral-care and insurance business units as well as on continued deleveraging.

Pippa Wicks, managing director at AlixPartners, said “It is an honor to work with the colleagues of the Co-op Group. It is an organization that has, at its core, the collective mindset to collaborate and grow sustainably. The £1.5 billion recapitalisation operation for the Bank was technically challenging, involving extensive negotiations with the Bank’s colleagues, multiple creditors and stakeholders. It constituted the first-ever European bank ‘bail-in’ without the need for public funding and has returned this iconic British business to a stable footing from which it can now grow.”