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Tony Reed has been appointed as Managing Director of Phoenix Fund Services (UK) Limited. He will report to John Rice, CEO, and join the Phoenix Fund Services’ executive management team. Reed will be responsible for managing the relationships with clients of Phoenix’s UK funds business as well as for Phoenix’s compliance and risk management. John Rice, Managing Director of Phoenix Fund Services, says: “Tony brings a wealth of experience to Phoenix having worked in a range of roles managing client relationships, running collective investment scheme operations and regulatory risk management at Insight Investment, JP Morgan, Halifax Bank of Scotland and
Investec Project and Infrastructure Finance has recently completed a new senior debt facility for Sea Fibre Networks Ltd. The USD7.5 million loan, for which Investec was the sole mandated lead arranger (MLA), will finance Europe’s most advanced sub-sea telecommunications network in a project which will link Ireland and the UK by fibre-optic cable. Additional equity was provided by a group of mainly US investors. This was part of a USD15m funding round with CC Equity LLC as the equity participants.   Running between Anglesey and Dublin, the sub-sea cable will be the first laid within Europe in eleven years.  This
Jeff Molitor, CIO Europe, Vanguard
In light of the current fiscal and monetary concerns that are gripping the minds of investors around the world, Institutional Asset Manager asked the heads of some of the world’s leading asset managers to share their thinking on portfolio management trends post-Lehman and beyond 2011 in concise fashion. Jeff Molitor (pictured), CIO Europe, Vanguard, responds: "In both the equity and fixed income space, the move away from capitalization-weighted benchmarks to equal-weighted or alternative benchmark approaches is an unfortunate trend in institutional investment segments, reflecting a backwards-looking view of the markets and active bets based on data-mining (marketed as indexing).  As
Brazil flag
Stratus Group, a Brazilian private equity firm focused on mid-market investments, has made a USD32 million investment to take a majority stake in a Brazilian corporate fleet management company, Maestro. The equity transaction was also financed by a co-investment from DEG – the German Development Financial Institution – and represents the first transaction of the Stratus Capital Partners program, which has recently been launched to follow the successful flagship fund, Stratus Growth Capital I.   
 
The car rental sector in Brazil grew by 17% in 2010 to USD3.1 billion, and has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 11% since
Survey
In the wake of several years of underwhelming performance and lack of liquidity, many private equity fund managers are increasing transparency and decreasing fees to attract and retain skeptical investors, according to a global survey report released by SEI in collaboration with Greenwich Associates. In fact, the majority of managers polled (59 per cent) said they have increased transparency to retain/attract new capital since the 2008 market decline, while more than a third of managers (37 per cent) said they have lowered management fees. The survey report, titled "Client Knowledge to Competitive Advantage," points to both an increasingly wary investor
RJD Partners (RJD) has sold its investment in TransLinc, the market leader in the provision of specialised vehicles and related services to local authorities and the utilities market, in a trade sale to May Gurney Integrated Services. The transaction values TransLinc at GBP65.6 million, giving a return to RJD of approximately 2.7x its original investment and an IRR of 26%. TransLinc is the second realisation from RJD’s second fund, RJD Private Equity Fund II. RJD backed the GBP50 million buyout of TransLinc in June 2007. Having originally been formed within Lincolnshire County Council, TransLinc has grown to become the market
Clapboard
Ingenious Ventures has launched its fifth Shelley Media Fund, providing another great opportunity for investment in the fast-growing entertainment sector.   The Fund will invest in HMRC pre-approved EIS companies producing films, television programmes and video games. These media sectors continue to exhibit strong indicators for sustained growth despite wider uncertainty in the macro-economic environment. Ingenious has made this exciting growth sector accessible to a wide market, with a minimum investment amount of just GBP3,000.   Ingenious Ventures anticipates that the Fund will generate tax free returns of 13.7% p.a. (a gross equivalent return of 27.3% p.a. for a 50% taxpayer).
Private equity firm Denham Capita has committed USD200M to establish an African mining platform in partnership with Pangea Exploration, a South African mining exploration company. The new business will target a wide range of opportunities across Africa. Pangea Exploration is led by Rob Still and his team, who have a strong track record of entrepreneurial success and proven operating experience in large corporate ventures. Mr. Still’s recent positions included Chairman of Zimbabwe Platinum Mines (Zimplats), Chairman of Metorex and director of Pan African Resources.  The new venture will look at opportunities across all stages of the project life cycle, from
Mark Spinner, partner, Eversheds
Prominent investors are using the recent market turmoil as an opportunity to pressure private equity firms into changing the way they organise their fee structures. Sovereign wealth funds have been particularly vociferous about changing the traditional model of management fees of up to two percent. Mark Spinner (pictured), partner at international law firm Eversheds, comments… The thorny issue of ‘excessive management fees’ has been around for a little while now and with some of the mega leveraged buy-out funds it is not hard to see why. A 2% annual management fee on a Fund of EUR6 billion amounts to a
Global venture capital firm Accel Partners has launched its Big Data Fund, a new USD100m investment initiative created to identify innovative entrepreneurs seeking to build category-defining companies at every layer of the Big Data stack. Accel’s Big Data Fund aims to fund transformative companies throughout the Big Data ecosystem, from next generation storage and data management platforms to a wide range of revolutionary software applications and services, including data analytics, vertical applications, mobile, and many more. Accel Partners will manage its Big Data Fund across global offices in US, London, China and India. "Big Data consistently drives innovation across our

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