Snippets from the TMA (Turnaround Management Association) December Newsletter – 2017 Year in Review
The highlight for 2017 and a significant milestone in TMAA’s 14-year history was the enactment of Safe Harbour legislation in September. Additionally, we focused on three other significant initiatives:
- Devising and publishing a set of TMA Best Practice Guidelines for Navigating Safe Harbour;
- Ensuring the education piece was a classroom based course involving experienced restructuring professionals, and then recognising experienced turnaround participants as Certified Turnaround Practitioners (CTP), and;
- Providing members, via our new collaboration with Foodbank Australia, with social citizenship opportunities and responsibilities to round out the broader community context in which we operate.
- After a decade of lobbying, and despite a last minute rear-guard action to undermine the legislation, the Safe Harbour passed into law with ipso facto reform to follow in 2018.
- While the law is not a complete panacea, its design encourages directors in distressed entities to focus on turnaround over insolvency and outcome over process.
- The TMA is also looking to collaborate more extensively with AICD, Finsia, AVCAL and other industry bodies similarly looking to educate like minded memberships of the power of corporate renewal and turnaround.
The TMAA believes our ambition of innovating business cultures to accept that corporate rescue should be contemplated early in a business cycle is achievable in the near to medium term.
Click here to read the Newsletter
Safe Harbour and Ipso Facto – TMA’s support and influence
- The TMAA has been at the forefront of working with Treasury and industry bodies to not only help boards understand the need to engage turnaround advisors to assist in distressed conditions, but also to ensure the broader business community recognises the benefits turnaround advisors bring to restructuring assignments – the success stories and awards TMA Australia celebrate at our national conference and state events, our efforts to allow capital to meet turnaround counterparties, the education programs we run and CTP accreditations and our social citizenship initiatives are all designed to raise this awareness.
- Legislative reform is a key part of building that culture, though legislative reform is not enough by itself.
- As an industry body, and as members of that body, we need to keep explaining to the business world the benefits of an early intervention by management and boards to save value by engaging in turnaround initiatives well before the time when financial defaults start to limit options for enterprises.
