Investigations & White-Collar Crime: Gwynn Hopkins Talks to Financier Worldwide

Our Managing Director Gwynn Hopkins was recently featured in the latest issue of Financier Worldwide, discussing Perun Consultants and white-collar crime in the age of COVID-19.

In what ways do you endeavor to support the career development of your colleagues rising through the ranks?

As the firm’s founder, I remain committed to directly supporting the growth and development of the team. Training courses give technical content, and everyone is highly encouraged to attend. This is supplemented by practical, hands-on experience where team members are fully supervised and supported in expanding their knowledge. In my opinion, one of the most important aspects of career development is to avoid getting stuck in a silo. While it is natural to develop a preference for a specialized niche, gaining exposure to a range of practice areas is incredibly helpful to one’s professional development. It adds perspective, and a wider array of tools that are frequently helpful in other disciplines. At Perun Consultants, we work to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to work across the assortment of cases on which we are engaged.

What strengths and characteristics do you, your team and your firm strive to demonstrate to clients?

Our core values—professional, proactive, pragmatic, honest—are aimed at delivering high quality, exceptional value services for clients, as well as a flexible work scope coupled with swift results. Our team is also highly diverse in terms of professional backgrounds, gender and nationality. We are not all accountants who moved from audit into forensic accounting or insolvency. Our staff includes former fund managers, former regulators, and people with

extensive prior business or other industry experience. With regard to gender and nationality, 50 percent of our director-level team are female, and our team members are from many different countries, all of whom have chosen to make Hong Kong or Singapore their home. Diversity gives an incredible degree of insight and range of abilities to assist clients in achieving solutions to their problems.

Reflecting on your area of expertise, how do you see this sphere of the market shaping up over the coming months? Are any exciting trends or developments on the horizon?

Forensic and Compliance

2020 was stressful, and distressed environments can lead to fraud as individuals within business functions resort to fraudulent conduct in order to try to cover up failing performance. Similarly, distressed environments can often lead to uncovering fraudulent conduct as it becomes harder to maintain the fraud schemes when funding options decline, business turnover falls, staff headcount declines, and so on, thus rendering it more difficult to conceal or perpetuate the fraud.

Social distancing, court closures and business disruption all contribute challenges to the forensic landscape. Adapting investigation techniques to deal with COVID-19-induced changing business patterns will continue to be a factor throughout 2021. Also, virtual testimony will be a more regular occurrence for expert witnesses; as we have all seen throughout 2020, video meetings can be effective, but are not always superior to in-person options – particularly when dealing with technical subjects. Experts will need to master the virtual testimony technology and related presentation skills in order to convey evidence as clearly and effectively as can be achieved during in-person testimony. 

Tightened regulatory requests business to design a fluid compliance program and sufficient access to data to have timely and effective monitoring and supervising to mitigate risks through data sharing and reporting suspicious transactions to local authorities.

Insolvency and Restructuring

Government support around the world held back some of the restructuring and insolvency activities in 2020. It’s expected that government support might end in early 2021 in some jurisdictions, which will have an impact on the local economy and businesses that have been severely weakened by the economic disruption of the last year. 

Aviation, hospitality, and the retail industry will continue to be seriously hit. More consolidation and restructuring of those businesses are expected.

In China, relatively constrained stimulus support from the government has given rise to a series of bond and corporate defaults. Although the domestic economy is generally recovering from the negative covid-19 impact, many Chinese corporations are still struggling because 1) their business is affected by the global economic downturn or 2) they have significant investments overseas. We expect to see mixed developments in the next 6-12 months with both recovery signs for some entities, as well as increased levels of failure among corporates that, despite the commencement of the vaccine roll outs, cannot sustain the ongoing economic difficulties caused by the pandemic.

The coming round of restructuring should be focused on repairing the balance sheet, helping businesses boost strategic agility and create a healthy recovery of their business models by simplifying their structures, clearing away non-core operations and freeing up funds for investment.