Richard Adam is an English chartered accountant and businessman particularly associated with the financial management of media, construction and property-related companies. He was a board director of construction and services business Carillion from April 2007 to December 2016. After the company went into liquidation in January 2018, Adam was criticised by a Parliamentary select committees report, and the Financial Reporting Council and other regulators started investigations into his conduct.
As finance director, Adam served as a board director of construction and services business Carillion from 2 April 2007 to 31 December 2016. He was succeeded by ex-ABP colleague Zafar Khan, who had been with Carillion since 2011. Adam was one of several former Carillion directors who appeared before Parliamentary select committees in early February 2018, and subsequently described as "delusional characters". As further information about pension issues emerged, directors were described as "contemptuous" of their obligations, with Adam said to have "particular questions to answer," particularly after MPs heard he had allegedly described pension payments as a "waste of money". On 26 February 2018, it was reported that Adam had sold £775,921 worth of Carillion shares in March and May 2017 - the latter sale just three months before a Carillion profit warning. On 17 March 2018, it was reported that the Financial Reporting Council's conduct committee would announce an investigation into the conduct of Richard Adam and Zafar Khan. The investigation, confirmed on 19 March 2018, would focus on the preparation and approval of Carillion's financial reports for 2014, 2015 and 2016, and the six months to 30 June 2017, as well as provision of other financial information from 2014 to 2017. In June 2018, a Financial Conduct Authority investigation was extended to allegations of insider trading in Carillion shares prior to its trading update on 10 July 2017. In the final report of the Parliamentary inquiry into the collapse of Carillion, published on 16 May 2018, Adam was severely criticised, described as "the architect of Carillion’s aggressive accounting policies". The report continued: The report also recommended that the Insolvency Service should consider whether the former Carillion directors, including Adam, could be disqualified from acting as a director. On 6 August 2018, at the end of "the largest ever trading liquidation in the UK", the Official Receiver said investigations into the cause of the company's failure, including the conduct of its directors, continued. Adam disputed the select committees' assertion that he considered that payments into Carillion's pension schemes were a "waste of money". The committees' response said the presented evidence led them to this "inescapable conclusion", which was "entirely in keeping with the Carillion board’s short-termist, cash-chasing, dividend-plumping approach." In a Channel 4Dispatches programme aired on 22 August 2018, Adam was criticised by former Carillion head of recruitment Jon Hull for creating "a culture of fear and confusion" and described as "very aloof... very controlling". In the same programme, financial analyst Stephen Rawlinson described Adam's approach to the company's internal financial reporting: "When the numbers didn’t come to where he wanted them to be he would simply say to the management ‘Go back and do the numbers again.’" Responding to the documentary, Adam said he did not recognise these views, and told the documentary makers that throughout his time at Carillion all of its accounts were approved by the board and audited. The parliamentary process and findings have been questioned as lacking in objectivity and thoroughness, treating a highly complex situation in an incomplete manner. Former Carillion CEO Richard Howson, contends that Carillion was a victim of its public sector clients and that "any analysis as to the causes of the failure of Carillion is not complete without looking at the way in which government and the wider public sector procured services from Carillion and failed to administer payments."
