Denzil Rankine is chief executive of AMR International, which he founded in 1991. He has grown the business to become a world leading market and strategic due diligence specialist, based in London, Frankfurt and New York.

Denzil has 20 years’ experience of advising companies on acquisitions and strategic development. After his early career in the US he has worked on many hundreds of acquisition programmes with European and American acquirers.

Denzil has advised on agreed and hostile acquisitions and private equity transactions with values ranging up to $2 bn. This work has taken him to 33 different countries.

Denzil is the author of four M&A related books: A Practical Guide to Acquisitions (Wiley), Commercial Due Diligence – a guide to reducing risk in acquisitions (Financial Times Prentice Hall), Why Acquisitions Fail (Financial Times Prentice Hall) and Due Diligence (Financial Times Prentice Hall).

Peter Howson is a director of AMR International, London’s leading Commercial Due Diligence specialist. Peter has over 20 years of M&A and business development experience both in industry and as an adviser. Before joining AMR in 1998 Peter worked in corporate finance at Barings where he focused on domestic and cross border deals in manufacturing industries. Prior to that he was part of the small team which, through 75 acquisitions and disposals, transformed TI Group, a UK PLC, from a domestic manufacturer of mainly commodity products into a global engineering company focused on specialist niche markets. He has also held senior finance and M&A roles with British Steel and T&N. He is a qualified accountant and has an MBA from Manchester Business School.