Clive Cowdery, the colourful insurance entrepreneur who founded Resolution, has relaunched his pioneering investment vehicle to target distressed financial services companies across Europe in the wake of the credit crunch.

Mr Cowdery, a former insurance broker, is planning to target restructuring opportunities among 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 acquisitions. It aims to work with existing management and will offer them the opportunity to take part in any restructuring plan.

Mr Cowdery said that he had been deluged with offers by banks to fund his new enterprise as well as to take stakes in Resolution vehicles. He said that Resolution would raise capital at the time of identifying a suitable investment. He denied that funding would be an issue in the current climate.

Resolution will work closely with Jon Hack, the head of the financial institutions group at Lazard, the investment bank. Mr Hack has advised both Mr Cowdery and Resolution since it was founded in 2003.

“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 that Resolution would target.

He said that Resolution would initially look at assets in the UK, Scandinavia, Ireland, the Netherlands and Germany – areas with standardised rules in place governing capital and supervision. “The oxygen for us has always been that vendors have always been willing to talk to us. We never talk about targets,” Mr Cowdery said.

Mr Cowdery founded Resolution as a closed life fund consolidator with £500,000 of his own money in 2003. Through a series of 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 numerous potential merger partners throughout the UK insurance world about potential deals.

Mr Cowdery relaunched Resolution yesterday when the sale of the former “zombie fund” was formally completed. Pearl, an investment firm run by Hugh Osmond, secured the assets for £4.9 billion after a hard-fought tussle with Standard Life.

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