Investors

Exclusive: PGGM expands investment team

The newly hired investment manager and analyst will join PGGM this month

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Dutch pension fund manager PGGM has expanded its investment team with two new hires, PEI has learnt.

Wouter van der Geest and Lisa Brouwer will be joining PGGM in mid-March, a spokesperson confirmed to PEI. Van der Geest will join as an investment manager, while Brouwer joins as an analyst, the spokesperson added.

Prior to PGGM, Van der Geest spent eight years at KPMG Corporate Finance, as an associate director. Before joining PGGM, Brouwer completed traineeships at ABN AMRO’s Corporate Finance department and Avedon Capital Partners, a Dutch private equity firm.

In January, PGGM lost one of its investment directors when Wouter Snoeijers joined Los Angeles-based private equity firm Levine Leichtman Capital Partners as a managing director.

PGGM continues to build out its alternative investment team following the sale of its stake in AlpInvest Partners in 2011 as it planned to set up its own private equity business. Over the past five years, PGGM has committed more than €8 billion to the asset class globally.

PGGM has committed between €50 million and €100 million to Black River Food Fund 2, which is managed by the private equity subsidiary of US agribusiness giant Cargill, PEI reported last month. Last year, PGGM also backed buyout firm Nordian Capital Partners, a spin-out from Dutch bank Rabobank, by investing 20 percent in the firm’s €300 million Nordian Fund II. As well as backing the team’s new fund, it bought a 20 percent stake in Nordian Fund I, which consists of 15 portfolio companies in the Netherlands. On the direct side, PGGM completed five European co-investments last year.

PGGM’s private equity team, which is led by Eric-Jan Vink, a former partner at Gilde Buy Out Partners, has also recently started to help underwrite the deals it co-invests in and share the due diligence costs with the lead-investing managers, rather than waiting to be invited into post-acquisition syndications.

In the annual PEI Awards, of which the results were announced this week, PGGM was crowned ‘limited partner of the year in Europe’.