Private Equity Professionals

Mid Europa promotes five

The promotions follow the close of the firm’s fourth fund on its revised €800m target last summer

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Mid Europa Partners, a firm focused on buyouts in Central and Eastern Europe and Turkey, has promoted five employees, according to a statement.

Pawel Padusinski has been promoted to partner, Manish Mittal to partner and chief operating officer, Robert Chmelar to director, Gyozo Lantos to associate and Helena Lehtmets to operations executive. Padusinski is based in the firm’s Warsaw office, while Mittal and Lehtmets are based in London and Chmelar and Lantos are based in Budapest.

Padusinski joined Mid Europa in 2005 and has worked on several deals, including Lux Med, which was sold to BUPA in 2013, and Alpha Medical, which the firm acquired in 2012. Chmelar joined the firm in 2007 and has worked on a number of deals, including the sale of T-Mobile Czech Republic to Deutsche Telekom in February 2014 for a total consideration of €828 million.

Mittal, Lantos and Lehtmets all joined the firm in 2012. Lantos has been involved in a number of Mid Europa deals, and is a deal team member of portfolio company Invitel, a fixed line telecommunications and broadband internet service provider in Hungary. During Lehtmets’ time with Mid Europa, her responsibilities have “evolved to working within operation and investor relations”, the firm said.

Mittal joined as a chief financial officer, and is responsible for Mid Europa’s financial and operational functions. He was previously finance director at Kennet Partners, and has also worked for Advent Venture Partners and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Mittal was also part of the fundraising team for Mid Europa Fund IV, which closed on its revised target of €800m in July 2014. The fund came to market in February 2013 with a target of €1 billion, but Mid Europa agreed with LPs to raise no more than €850 million amid concerns that the fund would be too large to do deals in the region, which have dropped in size in recent years, PEI reported earlier.

The firm also lowered the cap because it wanted to continue to offer 50 percent of each fund in co-investments. Fund IV, which held a €665 million first close in January, has an additional pre-allocated co-investment program of €650 million, PEI previously reported.

Fund IV will aim to deploy equity investments of between €75 million to 250 million in control buyouts of companies with enterprise values of up to €500 million.