Clive Cowdery, the colourful insurance entrepreneur who founded Resolution, has relaunched his pioneering investment vehicle to take advantage of credit-crunch-wounded financial services operations across Europe.

Mr Cowdery, a former insurance broker, is planning to target insurers, banks, asset managers and other credit-based financial assets ripe for balance sheet repair, break-up or consolidation.

Resolution will snap up stakes in public companies as well as embarking on full-scale corporate acquisitions. It aims to work closely with existing management and will offer them the opportunity to take part in any restructuring plan.

Mr Cowdery said he had been deluged with offers by banks to fund his new enterprise as well as take stakes in Resolution vehicles.

He will work closely with Jon Hack, the head of the financial institutions group at Lazard, who has advised both Mr Cowdery and Resolution since it started.

"If you are looking across Europe, you can see 300 companies in need of restructuring with meaningful balance sheets of more than £1 billion," Mr Cowdery said. He refused to be drawn on the size of companies Resolution would target.

He said Resolution would initially look at assets in the UK, Scandinavia, Ireland, the Netherlands and Germany - countries with standardised rules in place governing capital and supervision. He said he was "musing over" getting involved in opportunities in Spain and Italy.

"The oxygen for us has always been that vendors have always been willing to talk to us. We never talk about targets and we never talk about timing," Mr Cowdery said.

"The point for us is to restructure assets and then find who is the natural long-term owner of them."

Mr Cowdery founded Resolution as a closed life fund consolidator with £500,000 of his own money in 2003. Through a series of transformational mergers he turned it into a FTSE 100 insurance giant.

For months last year, the firm was forced into a permanent offer period after it emerged that it had been continually talking to all insurers about potential deals.

Today, the formal sale of the former "zombie fund" was completed, with Pearl, an investment firm run by Hugh Osmond, securing the assets for £4.9 billion. This gave Mr Cowdery a capital windfall of about £145 million.

Mr Cowdery, a former European manager at General Electric, the US conglomerate, said he was investing his own capital in the new Resolution project, although he declined to go into specifics.

"At the moment, Resolution is 100 per cent owned by me. That will change as we do transactions," he said.

It is expected that after he has completed several deals, Mr Cowdery will float Resolution again. He said it was already setting up listed investment entities for the London Stock Exchange and the Amsterdam arm of Euronext.

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