Fulfilling a prediction she made at the start of this year that 2013 would see her team strengthen with the recruitment of senior staff, Tanya Jovanovski, co-franchisee for Rawson Auctions Western Cape, announced this week that she and her co-franchisee, Victor Schonborn, had appointed two highly qualified legal practitioners, Cedric Greenwood and Michael McPetrie, as part of their team. Both, she said, are specialists in certain areas and both will bring new expertise to the operation.
Cedric Greenwood, said Jovanovski, is a law graduate from the University of Zimbabwe and is working towards his MBA at Wits. He has extensive experience in asset based finance and corporate debt restructuring.
His career has seen him working for two of South Africa’s major banks – Barclays Industrial Bank as a manager of their Joint Finance Companies Division in which he established specialised lease and instalment sale structures for major corporates and then with Stannic (a division of Standard Bank), in which he specialised in the establishment of off balance sheet funding structures for large multinational and local corporates.
Cedric, she added, was also the head of the Structured Finance Division of IOTA Financial Services which was listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and until recently served as a non-executive director on the JSE listed M Cubed Holdings board.
In his capacity as a Sales Partner, Cedric will concentrate on the commercial and industrial property sector of Rawson Auctions and, when necessary, assist clients with property related finance structures to ensure that they can indeed fund the properties that they are submitting bids for.
“It has to be appreciated,” he said recently, “that a great many sound deals fall by the wayside because the interested buyers require assistance with the funding structure and I see this as an area of the overall transaction in which I believe I can assist them.”
Michael McPetrie, said Jovanovski, has a law degree from UCT and has a master’s degree in law and economics from London University.
For 15 years he has been involved in commerce, holding senior executive positions in companies involved in plastics manufacturing and printing. He has extensive experience in company restructuring and business rescue. Michael also administered and managed insolvent estates and liquidated companies for two years and this experience, he believes, will be of great benefit in handling Rawson Auctions’ distressed property sales, of which there are always a fair number on the books.
Both McPetrie and Greenwood have said that with South Africa’s economy in its current volatile state, they see huge potential for professional auctioneering providing a totally clean and honest service because such services can and do provide a quick way out for those in difficult times.
