The watchdog has fined HW Fisher LLP and one of its partners £200,000 for serious professional failures during an audit of Liberty Commodities, a group within metals tycoon Sanjeev Gupta’s GFG Alliance.
The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) said HW Fisher LLP and lead auditor Simon Mott-Cowan showed a pervasive lack of “professional scepticism” during the audit for the financial year ended 31 March 2020. The regulator identified serious breaches across seven key audit areas, including revenue recognition, debt recoverability and going concern assessments.
The regulator also said the firm failed to properly understand Liberty Commodities’s business model. Most of Liberty Commodities’s sales were ‘back-to-back’, meaning it would purchase materials from a supplier only after agreeing to sell the same goods onward to a customer. The business model relied heavily on supply chain finance facilities from scandal-hit Greensill Capital UK and Wyelands Bank to finance commodity trading transactions.
Wyelands was also part of the GFG Alliance. In March 2025, PwC was fined over £4.5m for its audits of Wyelands Bank.
Greensill Capital, exposed through its ties to Gupta’s GFG Alliance, collapsed in 2021, triggering a major financial and political scandal. The UK Insolvency Service banned the founder, Lex Greensill, in June from serving as a company director for nine years.
Andrew Twomey, FRC, acting deputy executive counsel, said: “HW Fisher and Mr Mott-Cowan failed to comprehend and respond appropriately to obvious risks, including the risk of withdrawal of the Greensill financing facilities, despite the growing public scrutiny, as reported in the media at the time of the audit, on Greensill’s exposure to the GFG Alliance.”
“The case highlights, in particular, the importance of auditors’ work in understanding the entity and its environment, and how failures in this area can undermine the ultimate performance of the audit as a whole,” he added.
The FRC opened the probe in February 2022. On Tuesday, the regulator fined HW Fisher £200,000, reduced to £140,000 on admission, and formally declared that it failed to meet the requirements. The regulator fined Mott-Cowan £25,000, reduced to £17,500, and formally declared he failed to meet the requirements. The FRC said that, during its investigation, he voluntarily retired from all audit work at the end of 2025.
Private equity powers Sumer’s expansion
London-based accountancy firm HW Fisher merged with Sumer in October 2024 but retained its independent brand name. The FRC sanctions against HW Fisher predate its merger with the accountancy firm.
Former KPMG chief operating officer Warren Mead founded the fast-growing accountancy firm Sumer to serve the SME market.
The company, now the UK’s twelfth-largest accountancy group, is owned by private equity firm Penta Capital Partners. Last week, US investment firm TPG agreed to lead an investment backing Sumer at a valuation exceeding £1bn.