Banks' failure to lend to the corporate sector is creating "tremendous opportunities" for smaller players, Sir Peter Burt has said.

The former Bank of Scotland chief, who reported for the UK Government this summer on setting up a business bank, said he was "quite disturbed by the squeeze on small and medium-sized businesses".

But he said his own Promethean Investments -where he and sons Hamish and Michael Burt are partners - was among those set to expand to take advantage of the demand for finance.

Sir Peter was commenting on the suspension of trading in the shares of Promethean, the AIM-listed specialist investment group he created in 2005 with Promethean Investments as manager.

The listed group, where Lloyds Banking Group inherited a 22% stake from Bank of Scotland, has been in wind-up since shareholders voted in 2009 for a return of their cash, and had hoped to liquidate all its assets by the end of last year. But the company was left holding its major stake in TIS, the biggest player in the depressed traded endowment policy market, and its associated Protected Asset TEP Fund (PATF).

A bid from PATF for TIS emerged earlier this year but was aborted. In March, Sir Peter, Promethean's chairman, told shareholders the continued delay was "immensely frustrating".

Yesterday a plan finally emerged which will see TIS reverse into Promethean to acquire its AIM listing as a renamed "multi-strategy investment company". Sir Peter confirmed that would end the Burt connection.

Promethean shares, once at 132p, were suspended at 10p yesterday, valuing the business at £5.2 million, half of what Sir Peter said it paid for TIS. Shareholders have since 2009 received 94p a share back in sale proceeds.

Sir Peter said: "Timing was not great in the sense that in the middle of 2005 we were very close to the peak of the market. If you look back we did a pretty good job for the investors in the round, and they have had a substantial profit back over the last seven years."

He said if the proposed deal went ahead, Promethean shareholders would be left with "a smaller percentage of a bigger company" which had plans to widen its investment activities.