Gill Park becomes partner at mgr
International tax guru Gill Park has accepted a partnership role at mgr, the London-based chartered accountants has announced.
Park first joined mgr in 1998 as part of their tax department, before moving into the company’s newly created touring department. After relocating to Spain in 2008, she continued to raise the profile of mgr’s touring services, working with well-known artists from around the world and bringing numerous new clients to the company.
“Not only is Gill the best in the live music business, she’s also mgr, through and through”
The firm’s touring team assists international artists with their worldwide tax compliance while on tour. With Park leading the team into the post-pandemic era of live music and international touring, the company offered her partnership to cement the relationship with their longest-serving live music specialist.
“Not only is Gill the best in the live music business, she’s also mgr, through and through,” states managing partner, Nick Muir. “We love live music at mgr and we’re thrilled to have Gill as our partner.”
Speaking on her new appointment, Park comments, “I’m thrilled to continue my long-standing relationship with mgr now as a partner and I’m excited about the future of the touring team.”
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Music accountant charged over alleged $2.2m fraud
An Australian music industry accountant has been charged over the alleged embezzlement of A$2.2 million (€1.35m) from prominent clients including festivals and artists.
Damien Luscombe, a former partner and business manager at accountancy firm White Sky Music, is accused of several counts of obtaining financial advantage by deception and using false documents, reports The Age.
White Sky, which looks after the finances of of more than 500 artists, promoters, music festivals and record labels, reportedly suspended Luscombe in October last year after discovering discrepancies in the accounts of multiple major clients. The firm called in external auditors and provided a statement to Victoria Police’s fraud squad.
Alleged victims include Grammy-winning artist Gotye, electronic music group Peking Duk and organisers of the Laneway Festival.
Victoria Police have given the following update on the case.
“A 38-year-old South Morang man was charged with a range of offences including obtain financial advantage by deception and make/use false documents”
“Detectives from the financial crime squad have charged a man following an investigation into allegations of fraud relating to the management of a Collingwood-based business between 2011-2022,” says a spokesperson.
“A 38-year-old South Morang man was charged with a range of offences including obtain financial advantage by deception and make/use false documents.”
According to The Music Network, White Sky has declined to comment on the latest developments, but in October last year the company said it was in “absolute shock”.
Luscombe was bailed to appear at Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on 1 June.
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Renowned consultant Ed Grossman passes, aged 73
Ed Grossman, a renowned tax consultant to international touring artists, has passed away at the age of 73.
The London-born veteran was due to start chemotherapy for lung cancer this week but passed away suddenly yesterday morning (30 May).
Grossman’s employer at Brackman Chopra chartered accountants, Sunil Chopra, told IQ that he is “devastated and in shock”.
The pair started working together 33 years ago when they launched the music tax department at MGR chartered accountants in 1989.
Chopra left MGR to start his current company and Grossman joined him in 2015, clocking in seven years as a consult before his death.
“He is my adopted father,” Chopra tells IQ. “I am what I am in the music industry because of him. He taught me everything. He was the kind of guy you could go to with any problems – business or personal. He was the most genuine person I have ever known.
“I am what I am in the music industry because of him”
“Even if you have an argument, that doesn’t mean he’s thinking ill of you.He’s just having an argument because he wants to put a point across because he believes that he’s helping. He always wanted to help the clients. He brought life to the office – it is very quiet now.”
Martin Hopewell, founder of the International Live Music Conference (ILMC), also paid tribute to Grossman: “The ILMC just lost one of it’s longest-standing and best-loved members: the conference’s #1 food critic, poser of the most challenging, left-field questions and lover of a quick nap during the annual ‘autopsy’ session. He will be massively missed – the place just won’t be the same without him.”
Lionel Martin, a former business partner of Grossman, added: “[Grossman] was difficult to live with and difficult to live without but life will definitely involve less laughter without him in it.”
Martin says he first met Grossman in 1971, when he joined an accountancy firm in Oxford Circus called Goodman Myers Smith.
“The firm acted for the Rolling Stones and many other artists in the music industry,” Martin tells IQ. “At that time the newly moneyed industry was struggling to ‘work out the rules’. There were few better than Eddie to sort out the financial mess bands were making for themselves and I guess he went some way to teaching me and others how to do that.”
The pair left the firm by the mid-’70s and started our own firm called Grant Martin Grossman. “We were quite anti-establishment and had a firm logo which was a picture of a bowler hat, umbrella and galoshes (what were we thinking of),” Martin tells IQ. “After a few years, we disbanded the firm and Eddie went to work for a firm called Mercers Bryant.”
“There were few better than Eddie to sort out the financial mess bands were making for themselves”
In 1980, Martin started his own firm, MGR (previously Martin Greene), and three years later invited Grossman to join the company.
“He immediately became an important partner, looking after bands like Madness, Thompson Twins etc,” Martin continues. “We delivered some excellent work to our artist clients for many years and Eddie was at the helm in many of those cases. In around 2003/2004 Eddie switched over to handing international touring work representing big US bands touring Europe.
“He was eccentric to say the least, his passion for and insistence upon perfect work often resulted in friction in relationships but people who had the patience and intelligence to ‘stay with him’ know they benefited in many ways from their relationship with him and will miss him greatly. There have been several professional advisers substantially involved in regularising a fast expanding and financially chaotic music industry and I would definitely include Eddie in that list.”
Elsewhere, Claudio Trotta of Barley Arts in Italy wrote on Facebook: “We had so many great times together. You were a great professional resource of live entertainment and such a funny, lovely and nice man. A great and unique character.”
Geoff Ellis of DF Concerts in Scotland added that the news of Grossman’s passing is “very sad”.
Ed Grossman is survived by his wife Penny Grossman and their daughter Beth.
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Financial planning: Money’s too tight to mention
Unless you’ve been living under a rock since early March – in which case, welcome back! You’ve got a lot to catch up on – you’ll no doubt be exhausted from reading about the financial carnage wreaked upon the live entertainment business by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
So spare a thought for the accountants, financial advisers, investment experts, currency specialists and all those who have been on the front line since then, helping the live industry mitigate the impact of the crisis – and whose expertise will be key to getting live entertainment back on track when the time comes.
Creativity
Many firms who work with music industry clients have been forced to reinvent their businesses, as well as help their clients boost non-touring-related revenues in the face of the near-total halt in live music globally.
“We’re taking a hit because a lot of our artists’ income is reliant on touring,” explains Mike Skeet, a partner at Skeet Kaye Hopkins (SKH), the London office of US accounting firm Gelfand, Rennert & Feldman. “Our bigger clients can afford to ride things out, but a lot of our smaller artists are concerned they won’t survive.”
After the rescheduling rush in the first few weeks of the crisis, Skeet says much of his Covid-era work has revolved around helping many of those smaller artists access sources of funding. “Previously, they would tour almost non-stop and be out every summer for festivals,” he continues. “So now we’ve been doing a lot of work with helping clients look at government schemes and trying, where we can, to get them help.”
“When you stop running round like a lunatic and stop to focus, you can achieve big things”
Serena Humphrey, a former accountant who runs the UK-based financial coaching company The F Word, tells IQ she is using lockdown to launch The F Word Academy, a ‘finance school for small businesses’ that has been five years in the making and builds on a popular coronavirus business support group she started on Facebook.
Whereas, “at the moment, my team and I can work with 15 to 20 people,” the launch of the online academy scales the F Word business to reach thousands of potential new clients, she explains.
Lloyd Major of Halo Solutions, an F Word client, has similarly realigned his business after agreements to sell the company’s Halo security system to multiple major international venue clients fell through as a result of coronavirus-era purse tightening.
Major, CEO of the company formerly known as Crest Planning, says UK-based Halo lost six-figures’ worth of business – or 50% of turnover – in four weeks in March/April. Now, though, “we’ve picked up open-air cinemas in the East and West Midlands, a contract for NHS [National Health Service] logistics in Hampshire, and we’re talking to well-known artists about behind-closed-doors shows,” he explains.
“While some people would say we might as well just delete the rest of this year, we’re using the opportunity to look inwards and build better internal processes and have a fresh look at our business plans.”
“We’re hurting just like everybody else is”
International payments and foreign-exchange specialist Centtrip has also been hit by the halt in live events, says Freddy Greenish, the company’s head of music, film and entertainment. “We represent the best part of 600 artists, and the summer touring and festival season is always a big part of our year, so we’re hurting just like everybody is,” he comments.
“On the flipside, we have clients that earn foreign income from various different streams – not necessarily just on the live side – and where there’s been quite a bit of market volatility, that presented great opportunities for clients to sell dollars and euros and buy pounds, for example. When it all started to collapse around lockdown, sterling to dollar went to 1.15 [£1/$1.15]…
“So we’ve seen quite a few artists take advantage of that, where the rates have been preferable.”
“In terms of innovation, I do think, strangely, that the challenges have played well to our skillset,” says Paul Bedford, partner at Edition Capital, an investment company specialising in the entertainment and leisure sectors.
“If you are always making capital of strong financial management in a business and something like this comes along, you benefit massively from the fact that most of those businesses already have good habits, such as regularly reviewing cash flow to ensure that they don’t have issues lurking in the future, or, if they do, corrective action is taken to remedy the situation.”
“The shutdown has forced forward and dynamic thinking … where the ‘normal day’ is not relevant”
As the scale of the crisis became apparent, Bedford continues, “each of the senior staff worked closely with around five or six investors to ensure that a robust survival plan was put in place immediately.”
Now, he says, Edition holds “regular update meetings” with those clients “to tweak the plan and to slowly begin post-Covid discussions as to how the business might bounce back.”
“The pandemic shutdown has forced forward and dynamic thinking as it relates to communication and process, where the ‘normal day’ is not relevant,” says Steven Wren, tax partner at SRLV Accountants. “As always, knowing a client’s business inside and out is pivotal in providing proactive advice, as well as ensuring that we communicate with clients on a regular basis.”
Greenish adds that Centtrip has also experienced increased demand for its prepaid, multicurrency MasterCard during the pandemic. “For us, a big one we’ve pushed right from the beginning is trying to take any production or tour cashless through the card,” he explains. “It’s hugely popular, and those artists who haven’t already taken their tour cashless are certainly looking towards it.”
The card even makes sense from a hygiene perspective, he adds: “Even in lockdown we’re all using less cash anyway, as no one wants to transmit the disease.”
“We’re using the opportunity to look inwards and build better internal processes”
Humphrey comments: “This [Covid-19] is going to be in our lives for years now; you’ve got to focus on where the opportunities are. It’s making us all realise we can do big things very fast. This is a lesson in how when you stop running round like a lunatic and stop to focus, you can achieve big things.”
Wren says he has seen many music businesses take advantage of the various government- backed loans available in many countries, as they are seen “as a great source of cheap finance, with some enterprises obtaining significant amounts.” This, he says, demonstrates the viability of the industry to support such debt.
Solidarity
While every business IQ spoke to for this feature is weathering the coronavirus storm, many companies – especially those just starting out, or yet to find their feet – are not so lucky. “There are going to be so many business failures over the next six months,” observes Humphrey. “So many companies just didn’t have a viable business and never worked out how to make money.”
Continue reading this feature in the digital edition of IQ 91, or subscribe to the magazine here.
This article forms part of IQ’s Covid-19 resource centre – a knowledge hub of essential guidance and updating resources for uncertain times.
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Skiddle transforms accountant’s office into festival
Employees at Manchester-based accountancy firm Sedulo were in for a shock when they clocked in to find their office had been replaced by their own private, one day-only festival.
Recent research reveals 52% of fans book festival tickets while at work, and almost half of that 52% have bosses who have no idea what they’re doing. To illustrate this point and mark the start of the festival season, ticketing platform Skiddle decided to give the Mancunian office workers a shock.
To ensure a full festival experience, desks were traded out in favour of portaloos, food stalls in favour of the office canteen and the morning briefing was replaced by a set from Big Narstie.
This festival stunt is part of Skiddle’s new ‘Think Festivals, Think Skiddle’ campaign, which seeks to celebrate its status as the country’s biggest and most comprehensive festival guide.
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Stones, Bowie business manager Rascoff dies
Joseph Rascoff, the co-founder of Rascoff Zysblat Organization (RZO) and business manager to The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Paul Simon, U2, Sting, Shania Twain and David Byrne, has passed away aged 71.
The news was announced by long-time business partner Bill Zysblat, with whom Rascoff (pictured) founded RZO in 1987. He died yesterday “surrounded by family”, Pollstar quotes Zysblat as saying.
RZO represents financially an estimated 30 music clients – as well as the estate of Bowie, who died last January – and including in the live space, working with promoters on tours such as Sting’s 57th & 9th.
“Joe Rascoff was one of the good guys in a tough business”
In addition to his work with RZO, Rascoff was chairman of live entertainment at SFX Entertainment (now LiveStyle) until February 2015, by which he was owed an estimated US$350,000 when it went under last February. (He is still listed as being on LiveStyle’s board of directors.)
Nederlander Concerts CEO Alex Hodges tells IQ Rascoff was “one of the good guys in a tough business”. “He did the biz managing for some of my clients when I was an agent,” he explains. “Sad news. [He was] too young.”
The funeral will be at 9am this Sunday (9 April) at Hillside, 6001 West Centinela Avenue, in Los Angeles.
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