Cork Gully re-established by great grandson

CORK GULLY, one the UK’s most prestigious business recovery brands is to be revived by the founder’s great grandson.

The brand has been unused since the nineties but has been reestablished by Stephen Cork, the former head of restructuring at Smith & Williamson.

Cork’s great grandfather established the firm W H Cork, later changing it to W H Cork Gully & Co, which was in the Cork family for three generations.

Accountancy Age understands the firm W H Cork & Co was recently set up by Stephen Cork and a certificate of name change to Cork Gully granted last week.

Cork established several companies earlier this year, including Cork & Co ltd and W H Cork & Co. the companies have been registered with Companies House. A website www.corkgully.com is due to be launched soon.

In 1980 Sir Kenneth Cork and Roger Cork decided to merge Cork Gully into the larger firm Coopers & Lybrand. After Sir Kenneth’s death in 1991, Roger Cork moved to Moore Stephens and built up its corporate recovery practice.

The name Cork Gully stayed with Coopers & Lybrand which later merged to become PwC.

Cork Gully was the most famous name in insolvency for forty years before being subsumed in Coopers.

The height of its fame came when joined with the Bank of England to coordinate a plan preventing the widespread collapse of secondary banks during the property crash in the early seventies. The banks had lent heavily in property. Cork lent its name to “Cork’s Dam”, a plan to hold off creditors of the Stern Group while its properties were sold off in an orderly fashion.

Cork Gully staff also acted on a number of other high profile insolvencies including Michael Jordan who was joint liquidator on Barlow Clowes. Cork Gully also liquidated De Lorean, the short lived performance car maker.

Stephen Cork and PwC were unavailable for comment.