TowerBrook seals first deal from Fund IV

TowerBrook Capital Partners has agreed to acquire Independent Clinical Services (ICS) from The Blackstone Group, according to a statement.

Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed, but Blackstone yielded a return of more than 2x on the exit, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Both TowerBrook and Blackstone declined to comment beyond the statement.

London-based ICS is a provider of staffing, complex care services and administrative outsourcing for clients in the healthcare sector. The business has a database of 20,000 on-call temporary healthcare professionals and works with hospitals and GP surgeries to find workers with specialist skills at short notice.

The acquisition is made at a time of “strong market dynamics” for healthcare staffing services in the UK, driven by the need to improve efficiency of services in the UK’s National Health Service, TowerBrook said in the statement.

For TowerBrook, this is the first investment from its Fund IV, which closed on its $3.5 billion hard-cap in February 2013, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Last September, TowerBrook agreed to acquire a majority stake in AIM Aviation, a UK engineering business for the aviation industry, from LDC, the private equity arm of Lloyds Banking Group. That transaction was the last deal from TowerBrook’s third fund, a $2.8 billion 2008-vintage, PEI reported at the time.

Blackstone made the original investment in ICS from its fifth fund, Blackstone Capital Partners V, a $22.4 billion fund that was raised in 2005. The fund was valued at a 1.3x return and had a 5.5 percent net internal rate of return as of 30 September 2013, according to performance data from The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS).