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Andersen Consulting, one of the most powerful professional services brands of the 1990s, is set to be resurrected with the help of the man who has led the consulting firm for a decade.

The revival comes courtesy of Andersen Global, a tax business founded by alumni of the firm’s former parent company, auditor Arthur Andersen, which collapsed in 2002 after the Enron accounting scandal. The Andersen Consulting name has been dormant since 2000 when the business was spun off from Arthur Andersen and rebranded as Accenture.

Andersen Global quietly built a consulting arm after hiring George Shaheen, who was Andersen Consulting’s chief executive from 1989 to 1999, as a senior adviser. It plans to relaunch the historic brand next month, people familiar with the effort said.

Andersen Global was founded 23 years ago by Mark Vorsatz, a former Arthur Andersen tax partner, originally under the name WTAS. It acquired the rights to the Andersen brand and rebranded itself in 2014. The business is structured as an alliance of independent member companies and other affiliates with combined annual revenue of $ 2.5bn.

Until now, it has focused on tax and legal work but – like Arthur Andersen before it, and most accounting and tax businesses today – it was tempted by the opportunity to sell more services to clients.

In the last six months it has added 20 member companies in the US and globally focused consultationsaid people familiar with the deals.

Many have connections to Andersen Consulting or Arthur Andersen, the people said. These include Verraki, an IT solutions business in Africa led by the former head of Accenture in Nigeria, and Daniels Consulting, a strategy group whose founder was a manager at Arthur Andersen when it collapsed.

Andersen Global has also appointed Morgan Stanley to explore a flotation of its US business, which could unlock capital to acquire other member firms and more tightly integrate the new consulting business.

In the 1990s, Arthur Andersen’s consulting business outgrew the accounting firm that spawned it, and its brand still lives on, Vorsatz said.

“Andersen Consulting is the Coca-Cola of professional services,” he said. “If you’re over 40 in business, you know Andersen Consulting.”

Shaheen coordinates business development for new member firms at Andersen Global, with the goal of providing a range of consulting services from strategy advice and IT transformation to cyber security and sustainability. According to him it will not compete with one of Accenture’s main businesses as an outsourcing service provider.

“Accenture is a great company, but we don’t plan to copy it,” he said.

The new Andersen Consulting also differs from its predecessor from the 1990s in that it cannot be tied to an audit business, where conflict of interest regulations prevent cross-selling with audit clients.

“Andersen now has no independence issue and we can be as aggressive as we need to be,” Shaheen said.

Until he left for the ill-fated dotcom venture Webvan, Shaheen led Arthur Andersen’s repeated efforts at consulting business to win more autonomy from the accounting firm, in what became one of the most prominent corporate soap opera in the professional services sector.

For much of the 1990s, Andersen Consulting and Arthur Andersen operated uncomfortably as sister firms under an umbrella organization, but when the accounting business grew into a second consulting operation in direct competition, Shaheen filed for divorce.

Andersen Consulting was forced by an arbitrator to give up the name as part of a legal separation at the end of 2000. Accenture, which floated in the US the following year, is now the world’s largest consulting firm by revenue.