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Amigo has announced its boss is stepping down as the lender continues to search for a lifeline before it runs out of cash in July.
Kerry Penfold will immediately leave her role as chief executive and director of the publicly-listed company.
She will stay on as boss of the company’s subsidiaries, including Amigo Loans, until the end of the month, according to the firm.
Amigo chairman Jonathan Roe said Ms Penfold has “done an amazing job leading the team through to completion of a very complicated scheme of arrangement process”, adding that “she has decided this is the right time to move on to find a new opportunity”.
Nicholas Beal, Amigo’s chief restructuring officer, has joined the board as an executive director and will also take on Ms Penfold’s responsibilities.
Between 2005 and 2020, Amigo specialised in subprime guarantor loans – where a borrower’s friends or family promised they would pay back the loan if the borrower was unable to.
These were offered at high interest rates to people with poor credit histories or who struggled to borrow from traditional lenders. But the company was later found to have mis-sold to many of its customers.
The business agreed to pay them compensation and avoided a fine by the regulator because it was close to collapse.
It returned to lending in 2022 via a new platform, RewardRate, which offered unsecured loans.
But the company stopped offering loans more than two years ago and started winding down the business after failing to raise enough cash from investors to keep trading and pay the redress owed to customers.
On Monday, Amigo said it is still searching for a suitable “reverse takeover” target.
This is when a private company acquires a public company that no longer has any active operations, enabling the private firm to be listed on the public markets without going through the initial public offering (IPO) process.
Based on its budget and cost-cutting measures, “current resources will only be sufficient until early July 2025”, Amigo told shareholders.
After this, the company will need to raise more cash to continue its reverse takeover search, “failing which it will need to declare insolvency”, it warned.
Mr Roe said he is “grateful” to Mr Beal for his “support during this very difficult time for Amigo”.
“His contributions to board discussion, with particular focus on risk and regulation, have made sure that we have done the right thing for customers,” he said.
The chairman added that he is looking forward to working with Mr Beal to secure a takeover and “a long-term future” for the business.
English (US) ·