Advisory services
Our advisory services focus on helping you to take well thought financial decisions, improve your competitiveness and protect your interests in commercial conflict and fraud situations.
Transaction support services
The collective wisdom about M&A shows that acquirers usually pay too much and process leaders tend to get obsessed with the deal and don’t walk away when they should. Bearing this in mind, we offer a suit of transaction support services focused on providing facts, information and advice which facilitate well-thought financial decisions. These services include:
- Financial due diligence investigations of the targets
- Vendor due diligence
- Business valuations in advisory capacity
- Statutory valuation of in-kind contributions into the share capital
- Statutory audits of reorganisation agreements
- Pre-sale grooming of business.
Internal audit
Successful organisations recognise that an effective internal audit service can make a very positive contribution to the management of risk and the smooth operation of the business.
We can work with you to understand your business strategy and its associated business drivers, and how that strategy is delivered through an appropriate operational business plan and process framework. Your stakeholders will benefit from experienced independent professional evaluations and a review of the quality and effectiveness of the control environment within your organisation.
Where areas are identified for improvement, we can work with you to help you identify solutions and achieve your objectives.
Services include:
- Outsourcing of internal audit
- Advise on development of workable internal controls
- Providing advice on how to implement an effective internal control environment
- Advising on how to manage core operational risks
- Assisting with linking operational strategies and risk performance measures to business goals
- Assisting with change management and business awareness processes by helping make the transition from existing practices to more efficient and focused approaches through training and assisting of staff in the development of new skills
- Evaluating the key structures, dynamics and processes required to underpin effective corporate governance.
Strategic services
Due to the shift in the drivers underlying competitiveness, it is clear that thinking about strategy as one-off annual event is not a valid framework for managing strategy. The pace of change now-days is so swift that strategy should be subject to on-line test of its relevance. To do so, organisations should have good competence both in formulating and executing strategy.
Devising successful strategy to a large extent is an art. Execution of strategy though should not be. With this believe we can help small and medium size organisations:
- To challenge the facts and look at all “pre-requisite” areas before strategy gets formulated. Our input might be as minimal as participation in brain storming meeting to as large as executing the organisation’s full scope strategy audit;
- To assist with setting-up the framework for describing, communicating and managing strategy. We would use here the principles of balanced scorecard approach.
Investigation and forensic accounting services
Business interruption may cause a business to suffer loss of profit. If related corporate disputes end up in the courts, we can help the defendant to challenge the damage calculations assessed by the plaintiff. If we represent the plaintiff, then we can help the latter to understand clearly the magnitude of commercial damage.
Many surveys have shown that crime against businesses is increasing and is therefore an issue that every organisation large or small should be addressing. The impact of business crime can include major financial loss, compliance and regulatory infringement and even criminal proceedings. To this end we can assist you with:
- Fraud investigations
- Reviews of general IT control environment
- Review of anti-money laundering processes.
Contact persons:
Edvards Merhels
Managing partner
Certified Auditor, FCCA
edvards@merhels.lv
Briefly about Edvards
Edvards has been in the business of auditing since 1994. Until September 1998, when Merhels was founded, he worked in the Riga office of a large international audit firm, primarily being involved in the audits of commercial banks. Since autumn 1999, Edvards has been accredited as a Latvian certified auditor. In 2000, he became a member of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (FCCA).
While Edvards has participated in various audit and advisory engagements to a diverse range of organisations, he feels most inspired in handling transaction advisory related engagements, for example, financial due diligences and business valuations. His other fields of activity inter-alia include statutory valuations of in-kind contributions, forensic investigations, corporate taxation of companies, transfer pricing and assessment of economic losses.
Until 2010 Edvards was a long standing member of the Quality Assurance Committee at the Latvian Association of Certified Auditors.
Service lines
Audit, transaction support, financial advisory, computation of economic losses, strategic services, transfer pricing
Languages
Latvian, English, Russian
Track record:
300+ specialist advisory engagements
