As if dealing with the world's biggest corporate collapse, keeping clients abreast of the Walker Review and fretting about regulation stifling Britain's competitiveness isn't enough to keep the head of the globe's largest accountancy group occupied, PricewaterhouseCoopers's (PwC) chairman and senior partner has other weighty matters on his plate.

An environmental sustainability convert who has built the biggest practice on the issue of any of the big four accountancy groups, he's looking forward to the Copenhagen summit on climate change in a week's time.  
Two days after that comes the pre-Budget report and then we're into Christmas, with another round of retail collapses predicted by some of the gloomier analysts.
Whether it's business advice, insolvency services or advising companies moving domicile from Britain, Poopers, as the firm is affectionately nicknamed, seems to be having a good recession.
Suitably for a 32-year PwC veteran who earned his spurs as a corporate recovery specialist and later achieved a national profile as joint administrator of failed car maker MG Rover in 2005, Powell has much to say about PwC's role as administrator of Lehman Brothers International Europe.
The main UK and European trading company within the American investment bank, which collapsed 14 months ago, the London-based Lehman operation has a gap of about $16bn (£10bn) between the assets and liabilities on its $1 trillion balance sheet. Powell, 53, says sorting it all out will still be going on years after he has retired. It's a lucrative business too, bringing in £150m of fees for PwC so far.
“It's the biggest and the most complex insolvency in the world,” he says. “It's a 10 to 15-year project as we're dealing with about 1m derivatives and trades.” The firm is going back to the High Court to try to get permission to be able to treat creditors in classes, rather than individually, which would speed up the issue somewhat.
“The efforts we've put in so far have been rejected by the court so that's being reviewed again,” says Powell. “There are many people who are owed a lot of money and people who have got claims on assets.”
Powell doesn't agree with Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs chief executive, that the crisis is causing a long-term “resetting” of the global economy, and neither is he predicting the much-feared “W-shaped” or “double-dip” recession.
But he recognizes that the “slow and long tick up” shape that he does forecast for the economy could easily be knocked off course.
“It's going to be a relatively slow growth out of recession and we would regard it as pretty fragile,” he says. A “major failure would really damage confidence and could plunge us back into recession pretty quickly.”
He does worry that the regulatory reaction to the crisis could be such an event. “The key issue is that we don't do something that's completely at odds with the rest of the world,” he says. “If we damage the competitiveness of the British economy and our industries, then that will set us behind everyone else.”
He's happy enough with Sir David Walker's report on bank corporate governance, which was issued last week – “good, sensible and pragmatic” is his verdict – and believes that demonstration of personal responsibility through transparency is what is going to rebuild the belief in corporate integrity.
“The only way out of this recession is to grow out of it, so any regulation that puts this country at a disadvantage in terms of encouraging investment and restricts growth opportunities is what I'm most afraid of.” Then there's PwC's role in advising the flow of companies moving their domicile from the UK. Powell is defensive of claims that the firm is helping such clients avoid tax.
Powell joined the then PriceWaterhouse accountancy group as a trainee in 1977. He later moved to specialize in corporate recovery, beginning a long career path that led to the top job in July last year.
“We see it as the big investment area if you're going to be relevant in the future. Even if people or businesses don't get the sustainability issue, they will get it from a purely commercial perspective because businesses that have not got a great record and a great plan on sustainability will, in 10 years' time, be significantly down-valued, compared to businesses that have.”
(Source: Telegraph)