Private Equity
Candover has followed Permira and TPG Capital’s lead in shrinking the size of its fund and letting investors off previous commitments regarding uncalled capital. It is unlikely to be the last. Unlike its peers, Candover has officially signalled a shift away from larger LBOs – investments with an enterprise value of more than €500m traditionally – saying that a restructuring of the fund will also involve a “revised investment strategy, in light of both a smaller fund and the significant changes in the global economy in the last six months”. The likely translation is: Mid-market. Permira has rarely played in the mega LBO space, and while it is known to be looking at smaller deals, especially those involving already indebted businesses, a shift downwards is not expected to be on the cards.
4 min read · 19 February 2009
3 min read · 13 February 2009
HgCapital, a pan-European private equity investor, has announced the closure of its Amsterdam office and the cutting of its consumer and leisure team as part of a strategy rethink. The London-headquartered firm’s 45 investment professionals will now be organized into four enlarged sector groups: Technology media telecoms, healthcare, services and industrials, with the latter run out of the company’s Munich office.
4 min read · 10 February 2009
The Guidelines Monitoring Group, set up to review private equity’s compliance with the Walker Report, published its first report this week and was broadly positive on the industry’s first attempts at transparency and self-regulation. Not that you would know it from the press reaction. The Independent claimed that “just half of the private equity firms in the UK were complying with the rules laid down in the Walker report." To repeat, not ‘half of the private equity firms in the UK that the Walker report is relevant to’ but ‘half of all private equity firms in the UK’. Dan Roberts’ business blog in The Guardian (“Private equity, public shame”) adds that “it was only a small fraction of the private equity industry that agreed to sign up to these watered down guidelines in the first place”. As reported by sister title, IFR Buyouts Europe, what the report actually meant was
4 min read · 14 January 2009
Foxtons, a London estate agent owned by global private equity firm BC Partners, has breached its banking covenants. Andrew Newington, a partner at BC Partners, told a press briefing that Foxtons breached performance terms set by lenders in BC Partners’ reportedly £400m buyout of the upmarket London estate agency in May 2007, Bank of America and Japan’s Mizuho. “As housing markets fall, so do estate agents, so we got that wrong. In hindsight, we made the wrong assessment of the market.” The fate of the business is now believed to be in the hands of the banks, with BC Partners reportedly refusing to inject further cash until some
3 min read · 09 January 2009
2 min read · 08 January 2009
2 min read · 09 December 2008
2 min read · 08 December 2008
2 min read · 20 November 2008
European buyout chiefs will be looking to US policies on taxation and regulation adopted by President-elect Barack Obama when he begins his term of office at the beginning of next year, with a view to how it might impact on European domestic issues. “The danger is that kneejerk support for regulation and a tendency towards protectionism, which has been a feature of the US election, will gain traction internationally regardless of who is elected,” said Simon Walker, chief executive officer of the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, shortly before confirmation of Obama’s landslide win was announced. “It would not be right that the private equity industry in the UK, which has adopted a programme of self-regulation, gets swept up in this sentiment and becomes subject to a punitive tax
3 min read · 06 November 2008
