RIADA Capital Partners to support challenged and stressed NI firms

A new business turnaround and transformational private equity investment firm, RIADA Capital Partners has entered the Northern Ireland marketplace to support challenged and stressed local companies.

These will typically be good businesses requiring turnaround capital and financial restructuring.

Located in Belfast, RIADA Capital Partners are ‘special situations investors’ whose prospective investee businesses may be experiencing one or several issues from stress/distress, insolvency, management buy-in/buy-out, family/shareholder disputes, sale of the business, to the injection of capital investment to fund growth and acquisitions.

Co-founders Neil Adair and Gordon McElroy believe their combined 60 years’ experience can help good local businesses requiring turnaround capital and financial restructuring.

Both men are long-standing private equity investors with “hands-on” operational business experience who have had “to walk in the shoes” of their prospective clients.

The ‘turnaround and transformational private equity investment’ concept is relatively unheard of in Northern Ireland, more prevalent in London, however following Covid the local duo feel that it is needed now more than ever.

Neil explained: “Following a series of very significant events over the past 14 years, such as the Global Financial Crisis, Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic and most recently the onset of the tragic war in Ukraine, many businesses will require to reorganise and restructure their financial requirements and obligations into the future.

“That is where RIADA Capital Partners will provide support and practical solutions to companies facing significant challenges.

“We can step in and help those companies with fundamentally good potential but which, without our help, could be facing disaster.”

A PwC-trained chartered accountant and a UK and Irish licensed insolvency practitioner, Neil has over 36 years experience spanning corporate finance and restructuring, corporate banking, operational business management and is a long-standing pro-active Private-Equity Investor.

While Gordon McElroy is a leading corporate lawyer and founding partner of MKB Law in Belfast, who sits on the boards of a number of NI and ROI companies advising on strategy and corporate governance. He’s also a former president of Belfast Chamber.

RIADA Capital Partners can make investments anywhere from £50,000 to £1,000,000 of new cash from our own partner-led private-equity fund.

Neil and Gordon have personally invested in establishing the fund and will have “skin in the game” with each project Riada takes on.

The new firm hopes to work closely with professional advisers, financiers and lenders, accountants and solicitors to identify the right companies that will benefit from the assistance and support of RIADA Capital Partners.

Highlighting the need to empathise with entrepreneurs and business people that they seek to support and work with, Gordon added: “Professional advisers should see us as a welcome alternative in the advisory and investment space, another option for their client companies who are going through periods of financial difficulty and significant challenges and we look forward to working with them in the coming months and years to help their clients find solid solutions.

“Ultimately, our interest is in reaching satisfactory solutions acceptable to all stakeholders associated with a business and bringing certainty to all concerned, that is what really matters!”

RIADA Capital Partners has two strands to their business: Investment into prospective companies and Advisory services, which include the provision of debt and all other forms of finance, financial and operational restructuring, insolvency and restructuring services, mergers & acquisitions advisory, including, management buy-outs and buy-ins, as well as disposals, trusts and asset protection.