About Kroll

Kroll, the world’s leading risk consulting company, provides a broad range of investigative, intelligence, financial, security and technology services to help clients reduce risks, solve problems and capitalize on opportunities. Headquartered in New York with offices in more than 65 cities in over 33 countries, Kroll has a multidisciplinary corps of more than 4,800 employees and serves a global clientele of law firms, financial institutions, corporations, non-profit institutions, government agencies, and individuals. It is a subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc. (NYSE: MMC), the global professional services firm.

 

Interview with David Holukoff and Glen Harloff Directors of KROLL

What is Kroll?

It is a risk management company which started off in 1972 by Julius Kroll. It really started off as a private investigator firm in New York and has expanded worldwide.

As it has grown it included other advisory services to the point where advisory services now are probably a larger component.
                                                                                                                                                                  
Kroll offers forensic accounting, due diligence, valuations and insolvency and a host of additional things - but these are the ones we are focusing on in Grenada.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    
In dealing with risk which we all face, you as a journalist, the way you assess it is through information for the first part, knowing what your risks are.

The second part, once we help you understand by providing the information we also help you resolve problems.  If the risk ratio changes a bit and you end up in a court proceeding then we’ll act as a forensic accountant or investigator, make reports to the court, be your expert witness.

Your release stated that you’re opening up in Grenada to serve the Caribbean. Why is the world’s leading risk consulting company coming to the Caribbean and Grenada at this point?

I guess the easiest way to answer that is that both David and I have been working in the Caribbean. I for at least 10 years and David or 6 to 7 years and there a number of things that are going on in the Caribbean with the offshore banks and the banks which they have here have a high level of activity related to the US operations and UK operations which make the Caribbean very active and placing ourselves makes us ready to respond to anybody who needs our services.

One can think of the Bahamas, Trinidad Jamaica or Barbados that have greater activity than Grenada. Why is Grenada your base?

The main thing is that we both live here and that’s really it. You can’t expect your business to be all in one island, we know that there is going to be travel and we just happen to like Grenada. It is a great place to live and we think it is quite simple to get to the other islands.

We don’t expect to be working on any one island more than 1% of the time and 99% of the time we know that we will be going between islands.

DAVID HOLUKOFFAND GLEN HARLOFF

But what would you say is the single event or reality that would most warrant this facility in the region?

First of all you have the offshore and we have offices in the Caymans and BVI as well, and they service a large portion of the offshore sector. We also assist them as they deal with issues like insolvency and we do a lot more of the forensic accounting and investigation.

We also do work on the restructuring side for the domestic banks throughout the region.  Before I joined Kroll I did work in Dominica, Antigua, Barbados, working for local companies helping them solve their problems.

With the advent of CSME which is changing the business environment we are now seeing, rather than a company based purely in Grenada or Barbados they are now expanding their operations to other islands so they need professional services to help solve some of their problems as they venture into the region and then we’re getting more international investment into the region as well.

A lot of these companies, in the past they may not necessarily have dealt with fraud and these types of issues locally but now they are becoming publicly trading companies. We are trying to develop a stock market in the area and securities so we are really moving into the next stage of business and this requires that there are internal controls and the business is run at a standard that people want to invest in so I think it is important for us to be here to help businesses to deal with those types of issues.

Also traditionally I think that the accounting firms, or I prefer to refer to them as auditing firms, were more focused on auditing for tax and really didn’t offer the broader services that the companies are looking for nowadays.

The offshore fiasco that we faced in the mid-nineties, the lack of due diligence and so on, have you recognized our vulnerability and are prepared to help us to deal with it as the market expands and more North American and European businesses come into the region?

The structural side of offshore is not our mandate but that of government and the various governments in the islands are putting in new legislation to deal with offshore businesses mainly because they’ve recognized the problems of the past and are trying to make it work properly.

Can I ask you will Kroll’s presence in the region seriously reduce the risk of offshore misbehavior?

As the economies are developing and the services, the professionals and everybody else are climbing up to help their clients, when they would run into issues I think in the past sometimes people would look at some of the local service providers and for various reasons didn’t want to hire them and instead they would bring in people from outside.

One of the things we are doing with the establishment of Kroll’s is first of all we are minimizing the need to bring in people from the UK, the US or Canada.

The other thing is as we hire and train staff and go through that we are helping build up an overall professional base in the region to deal with these risks.

Also as part of our ongoing operations we do training seminars and things like that with different companies, different regulators and so forth sharing our knowledge and hopefully they are sharing some of their experiences and so forth with us and through that I think we minimize risk.

Your company said that you can help local and Caribbean businesses capitalize on opportunities and solve problems what are come of the opportunities you have seen, what companies can benefit and what role will you play?

In terms of opportunities, one of the first that comes to mind, whenever I am going into a negotiation I always want to understand everything I can, so if I am going to buy a business or do a significant contract with somebody I want to have as much information as possible about the individuals I am to deal with, the companies I am dealing with, their background and so in terms of opportunity we bring an opportunity for people to negotiate better and more effectively with their competitors, suppliers and so forth.

It’s kind of an unusual opportunity but the more you know when you’re negotiating the better off you are in terms of getting the result that favors you. That kind of deals with the due diligence side, on the fraud and investigator side we know how to deal with the issue and help them resolve the problem whether it and internal fraud case of externally we have the resources and the connections worldwide to help them recover funds, to deal with employee issues, and the other main thing we do with any kind of investigation is we help prevent it from happening again. If you have money going out the door through stealing or fraud we can help the company put in the proper internal controls that will at least reduce the risk of it occurring again.

When you take it from the restructuring side, CSME is going to crate a lot of structural changes throughout the region as local businesses face more regional competition and a lot of the companies throughout the region that were historically more protected in their areas, as they face competition they might have to restructure to take on this competition.

An example is the airlines. If you look at what has happened in the US over the last 10 years all the airlines have gone through restructuring and with they rescheduled and restructured their debts to make them more competitive.

If you haven’t gone through a restructuring you might have old debts, old agreements with employees and you are facing somebody who is changing all that in their business.

So they have a balance sheet that they are going to the market with which might have less debt or more favorable agreements.

You are stuck with your old ones trying to compete with somebody who has just gotten a fresh start.

So I think we can help businesses take advantage of the opportunities there are, to make them more competitive, and structure their finances so they can deal with competitors when they come in.