- The FRC fined and banned London audit firm King & King and senior partner Milankumar Patel following an investigation into four audits of GFG Alliance subsidiaries (2019–20).
- Key failures included losing independence due to financial reliance on GFG (fees rising from 15% to 41% of income), and failing to challenge suspicious accounting.
- K&K received a £52,500 fine and a five-year ban from the PIE auditor register; Patel was hit with £326,184 in sanctions, had his audit-signing rights withdrawn.
A small London audit firm has been fined and banned from major audit work after regulators found it repeatedly failed to challenge suspicious accounting at companies linked to Sanjeev Gupta’s GFG Alliance industrial group.
The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) issued its ruling against King & King (K&K), the small six-partner London-based auditing firm, and Milankumar Patel, the firm’s senior partner who held over 60% of its voting rights, on 17 December 2025, following an investigation into four audits conducted between 2019 and 2020. Both admitted the breaches.
The FRC found that K&K and Mr Patel had breached the fundamental principles governing statutory audit across all four engagements. Broadly, the failures fell into three broad categories.
Firstly, financial dependence on GFG resulted in K&K losing its own independence to challenge them. In three financial years, K&K went from earning 15% (2019) of its income from GFG to earning 41% (2021). Patel personally pocketed £414,202 in 2020 and £463,265 in 2021 from GFG-related work, as all GFG profits were allocated to him.
The firm’s response was to check whether any single GFG audit exceeded 10% of fees; since none did individually, K&K concluded there was no problem. The FRC called this approach “flawed and artificial” and “obviously wrong”.
Secondly, K&K failed to properly audit unusual income and expense items that were making loss-making companies look profitable. The report highlights Speciality Steel, the UK-based steel manufacturer whose subsidiary SSUK had recorded a £16.5 million provision for asbestos remediation and emissions liabilities in 2018. The financial statements containing it were signed in March 2019.
Three months later, management told K&K that £13.2 million of the provision was to be released, thereby transforming Speciality’s £8.2 million loss before tax into a £5 million profit.
K&K’s own audit manager challenged management, noting plainly that the reversal “flips the company from a loss to a profit.” The GFG chief financial officer then rang Patel directly, who forwarded the challenge email to colleagues, describing it as “a bit sensitive.” The challenge was dropped entirely.
Further accountancy failures by K&K were documented in the cases of Alvance British Aluminium (the Scottish aluminium smelter), Liberty Steel Newport (the Welsh steel roller), and Liberty Performance Steels (the steel manufacturer based in West Bromwich).
“There were, of course, already a large number of warning signs years ago: a large amount of undisclosed related party transactions, trade with no commercial rationale, and a lack of financing from key institutional players,” Jonas Rey, Founder and Partner at corporate intelligence consultancy firm Athena Intelligence, told Trade Finance Global (TFG).
The four companies are subsidiaries of Singapore-based Liberty Holding Group (LHG) – one of the core operating brands within GFG, focussed on steel and aluminium.
Ties to Greensill Capital
The GFG Alliance itself collapsed into crisis in 2021, when its principal financier, Greensill Capital, itself went under, cutting off the supply of credit that had apparently been sustaining the group. Questions about the substance of GFG’s reported finances, the reliability of its accounts and the true state of its businesses quickly became public. K&K resigned from, or was stood down from, all remaining GFG engagements in 2022.
K&K were also auditors of NMC Healthcare, the high-profile Dubai-based healthcare chain (listed in London), which defaulted in 2019; Greensill was party to NMC’s collapse, having loaned them $137 million from their Credit Suisse funds.
The penalties
King & King was fined £52,500 after a 25% discount for early admissions, issued a severe reprimand, and banned from the PIE auditor register for five years and from auditing large private companies for two years.
Patel faces a total financial sanction of £326,184, including £288,684 in disgorgement of profits earned above the level the FRC considered acceptable. His Responsible Individual status – allowing him to sign audit reports – has been withdrawn. He is banned from all statutory audit work for three years and cannot apply to return for a further two years after that.
The FRC confirmed that the financial statements themselves were not alleged to have been misstated. The finding was that K&K never did sufficient work to determine whether they were.
