Transparently Wrong
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
