Grant Thornton CEO defends Cinven buyout as audit quality test

The chief executive of Grant Thornton UK has offered the most explicit defence yet of private equity's arrival in British accountancy, arguing that a buyout firm's profit motive makes audit quality more, not less, likely to survive scrutiny. In an interview with the Financial Times published on 21 September, Malcolm Gomersall confronted head-on the criticism that financial owners erode professional independence — and made the eventual resale of the firm the centrepiece of his case123.

His argument is disarmingly simple: a firm that must one day be sold cannot afford to be careless. Cinven, the European buyout group, took a 60 per cent majority stake in Grant Thornton UK in 2024, a deal that valued Britain's sixth-largest accountancy firm at roughly £1.5bn and stands as the largest private equity investment in a UK accounting firm to date12310. "Eventually [Cinven] will exit, and then we will have a different ownership structure. That includes a sale," Gomersall said. "You cannot sell something which has an awful reputation for quality because nobody will want to buy it"12.

The buyout that reset the ownership model

The Cinven transaction was not an isolated British curiosity but the UK chapter of a sector-wide restructuring of who owns accountancy firms. Months before Cinven's stake closed, the US arm of Grant Thornton — a separate entity — sold a majority stake to New Mountain Capital, a New York firm with roughly $50bn under management, in what was billed as the largest private equity transaction the accounting profession had seen21222728. That deal was announced in March 2024 and completed at the end of May, after regulatory approval25.

The structure of the US transaction revealed the playbook. Proceeds, supplemented by debt financing, were earmarked to return capital to sitting partners, buy out retirement obligations owed to former ones, and build a war chest for acquisitions and technology investment2228. The US firm also adopted an alternative practice structure, splitting the licensed CPA entity that performs audits from a separate advisory vehicle that can carry outside capital — a legal firewall designed to keep investor money away from attest work21. New Mountain was already an experienced operator in the space, having previously taken control of Citrin Cooperman, though reports disagree on the timing, with one account dating that deal to 2021 and another to 20222122.

Gomersall's UK version of the guardrails is behavioral rather than structural: Grant Thornton will not audit companies that Cinven has invested in123. It is a meaningful restriction, but a self-imposed one — and it leaves the deeper question of culture to be settled by management rather than by regulation.

The exit is the argument

What distinguishes Gomersall's defence from standard corporate reassurance is that he leans into the exit rather than downplaying it. Most executives under private equity ownership prefer to talk about permanence; he treats the future sale as the mechanism that disciplines the present. On this reading, quality control is not a regulatory obligation grudgingly met but an asset-protection strategy — the firm's reputation is literally its exit value.

That logic has genuine force as an alignment of incentives, but it is worth stating plainly what it concedes. Audit quality is being reframed from a professional end in itself into an input to a valuation. The partner-tenure model that historically governed accountancy firms, in which quality failures were borne by the people whose names sat on the letterhead, is replaced by an ownership model in which the ultimate guarantor of rigour is a fund's need to find a buyer. Critics warn precisely that profit-focused buyout ownership can encourage a shorter-term culture at audit firms, and Gomersall's answer — that the exit calendar itself punishes corner-cutting — is the strongest available rebuttal to that charge, not a refutation of the premise23.

The exit environment also matters more than the defence acknowledges. Private equity as an asset class is contending with a clogged pipeline: more than 13,500 US companies are sitting unsold in PE portfolios, hundreds of them held far longer than funds historically tolerate, amid warnings that accumulated debt could eventually push some portfolio companies to collapse6. A sector that entered buyout ownership expecting a five-to-seven-year hold may find the eventual Grant Thornton exit arriving later, and on different terms, than either the firm or its investor planned. Gomersall is candid that a sale is coming; the harder question is what the firm looks like if it is slow to arrive.

Why capital is flooding into accounting

The debate over independence risks obscuring why this is happening at all. The wave of private equity deals — EisnerAmper's TowerBrook-led infusion in 2021, followed by Citrin Cooperman, Cherry Bekaert, and a roughly $1bn Hellman & Friedman and Valeas stake of just over 50 per cent in Baker Tilly — is a response to capital demands the traditional partnership model struggles to meet2528.

The most vivid illustration came in July, when Grant Thornton Advisors agreed to acquire CBIZ in an all-cash transaction with a $5bn enterprise value, with New Mountain making a further equity investment to enable it and CBIZ shareholders receiving $55.00 per share26. The firms billed it as the largest transaction of its kind in more than 25 years and said it would create the fifth-largest professional services, tax and advisory provider in the US26. CBIZ itself had absorbed Marcum for $2.3bn less than two years earlier — consolidation begetting consolidation9.

One academic analysis argues the deeper driver is a technology shock: artificial intelligence has raised the capital intensity of public accounting, and the money flooding in reflects the sector's need to fund that transition, not merely Wall Street's appetite for fee streams9. The UK evidence points the same direction. BDO, Grant Thornton's mid-market rival, cut 31 partner roles this year under pressure from AI and falling profits; Evelyn Partners sold its professional services business to Apax; and BDO has explored using private capital to fund mergers among its regional firms10. The choice facing mid-tier firms increasingly looks like scale through outside capital, or slow decline.

The US firm's behaviour under New Mountain also previews what the money buys. It has acquired more than half a dozen member firms across Europe and the Middle East, rolling them into a new holding company, Grant Thornton Global Advisors, in an effort to build the centralised structure that only the Big Four have historically afforded29, and it has combined its advisory platform with Grant Thornton Ireland's advisory and tax businesses30.

What to watch from here

Grant Thornton UK, for its part, is chasing scale of its own, targeting £1bn in annual revenue, with rolling twelve-month revenue past £800m as of June, and it expects to exceed its plan of hiring 160 new partners by the end of 20273. Gomersall frames the Cinven stake as supporting both the quality controls and the expansion the firm needs to rebuild its position at the upper end of the market3.

The honest assessment of the Gomersall defence is that it is coherent and unusually candid, but circular at its core: private equity ownership protects audit quality because bad audit quality would damage the exit, and the exit is the point of the ownership. That works as long as two conditions hold — that the reputational cost of failure translates reliably into valuation, and that the guardrails against conflicts, such as never auditing a Cinven investee, survive intact under commercial pressure. Both are management promises, not regulatory guarantees.

Meanwhile, the global footprint of the experiment keeps expanding. The CBIZ transaction, underwritten with fresh New Mountain money, shows what a mature private equity playbook in accountancy looks like: roll up, integrate, invest in technology, and prepare the consolidated asset for the next owner26. If Grant Thornton UK's trajectory follows its American counterpart, the eventual Cinven exit will not be a return to the old partnership model but another transaction in an ongoing chain. Gomersall's defence, in the end, is less a rebuttal of private equity's critics than a clear-eyed description of the world they fear — one in which the profession's custodianship and an investor's exit strategy are expected, on faith, to point in the same direction.