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The chief financial officer at embattled engineer John Wood Group has stepped down with immediate effect after he admitted to misstating his professional qualifications.
The UK-listed company, whose share price has collapsed in the past week, said its board had accepted Arvind Balan’s resignation in an announcement to the stock exchange, hours after being questioned by the Financial Times about his qualifications.
The oilfield services and engineering company — one of the few multinational success stories that the UK was able to grow out of the development of its North Sea resources — said Balan had given an “incorrect description of his professional qualifications in various statements in the public domain”.
Wood’s annual report and website described Balan as a chartered accountant. However, Balan does not appear on registers of chartered accountants in the UK or Australia, the bodies responsible for maintaining the registers told the FT.
The FT subsequently asked Wood Group where Balan was registered as a chartered accountant. The company declined to comment.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Balan is a certified practising accountant with the CPA Australia. The CPA qualification is a respected route and roughly equivalent to chartered accountancy, but is viewed as less prestigious by some accountants.
The CPA includes study towards a wider range of services than the more technical chartered accountancy route.
Balan, who had been in the CFO job less than a year, said: “Regrettably, I made an honest oversight with respect to the description of my professional qualification as a chartered accountant instead of a certified practicing [sic] accountant.
“I continue to believe in the long-term potential of the company and its people. My decision is based on minimising distraction at this very pivotal time with our investors and lenders.”
The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales jointly owns the trademark to the term “chartered accountant” and takes misrepresentations about who has earned the qualification “very seriously”, according to guidance on its website. This was to prevent members of the public being “misled into thinking that the individual is a qualified chartered accountant”, the guidance says.
The ethics code that binds CPA Australia members requires “integrity” and states that members “shall not knowingly be associated with reports . . . (containing) a materially false or misleading statement . . . or information provided recklessly”.
Laura Empson, professor in the management of professional service firms at Bayes Business School, said that “any misrepresentation of your professional qualifications, whether accidental or deliberate, raises questions about your reliability and integrity as a professional”.
Balan’s exit comes at a critical moment for the FTSE 250 company, whose share price has plummeted 64 per cent in the past week after it reported on Friday that its free cash flow for 2025 would be negative by as much as $200mn, having previously stated it would be positive.
It also reported “material” weaknesses in its governance uncovered by an independent review which was launched in November following conversations with its auditor.
The Aberdeen-based company had a market capitalisation of more than £5bn as recently as 2018 but this had fallen to about £170mn by this week.
It was valued at as much as £1.6bn last year in a takeover bid by Sidara before the Dubai-based company walked away in August, citing “geopolitical risks and financial market uncertainty”.
An earlier approach from Apollo Global in May 2023 valued Wood at about £2.2bn including debt, although the suitor also ultimately walked away.
In a statement on Friday, the company said its net debt stood at about $1.1bn, and the company was looking at “all potential refinancing options” as debt facilities approached maturity in October 2026.
Wood said it would make an announcement on Balan’s successor, and interim cover “in due course”.
