David Toll

The full cost of having to register as investment advisers has really started to sink in with buyout shops. Olympus Partners puts the figure for itself at $500,000 to $600,000 by late spring, not counting annual costs beyond (see other estimates below). Under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, buyout firms with […]

The owners of the New York Mets, the target of a lawsuit seeking to recover some $300 million in fictitious profits for victims of the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, have significant private equity holdings, an analysis by sister Buyouts magazine finds. In fact, the owners may have used money from accounts held with Madoff’s firm to help launch a manager of funds of funds. At the center of the lawsuit, unveiled late last week, are defendants and brother-in-laws Saul B. Katz and Fred Wilpon (pictured), who co-founded Sterling Equities in 1972 to develop and invest in real estate but later expanded to include venture capital and leveraged buyouts. The New York-based firm first invested in the New York Mets in 1980 and later gained control of the team in 2002. In the lawsuit, Irving H. Picard, the trustee charged with recovering money on behalf of Madoff victims, documents a close financial relationship between Sterling Equities and Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. Dating back to at least 1985, the relationship eventually grew to include private equity and other businesses run by Sterling Equities.

President Barack Obama last month ordered federal agencies to review business rules already on the books with an eye toward eliminating “outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive,” according to his recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. This will surely lead to some good. But given the lengthening roll of red tape facing financial sponsors (headlined by requirement to register as investment advisers), it must have been tough for them not to stifle a sarcastic chuckle. Indeed, in a relatively little noted action last summer, the Federal Trade Commission proposed changes to its Hart-Scott-Rodino pre-merger notification rules to give it more information upfront about buyouts and other M&A deals to determine if they raise antitrust concerns.

If you want to understand sponsor behavior, it’s often a good idea to look at what’s going on with institutional investors. So it is with recruiting. Among the biggest recruitment trends of last year expected to extend well into 2011: a surge in hiring at the junior levels, the beefing up of investor relations and […]

Prognosticators and pundits are hurling every prediction and possibility on topics ranging from the economy to professional sports to the Academy Awards for 2011, so we here at peHub thought we’d weigh in with a few of our own. Just don’t bet the farm on these ones to come to fruition. “Chooch 2—North To Alaska” becomes a surprise Memorial Day hit, more than earning enough money to pay off all of investor Steven Rattner’s fines. Google will give two more companies instant, overnight desirability and massive fundraising clout by being rejected as a bidder. Again. Warren Buffett gets caught skinny-dipping on the Jersey Shore, disproving his saying that it’s only when the tide goes out that you know who’s not wearing a bathing suit.

Sister magazine Buyouts recently caught up with Navigation Capital Partners co-founder and Managing GP Larry Mock, who suggested the firm is already or may soon be in the market seeking in the neighborhood of $250 million for a new growth equity and buyout fund. Here’s our five questions for Mock: 1) Larry, in 2006 you engineered […]

It wasn’t necessarily the headline news coming out of the latest (and always excellent) Probitas Partners survey of institutional investors, but deep in the survey report you can learn which partnership terms and conditions LPs are most focused on going into the new year. Altogether more than 180 investors around the world–a mix of funds-of-funds […]

Nearly half of business executives responding to a survey on Monday agree that New York's attorney general should go ahead with fraud charges against Ernst & Young. The Wall Street Journal on Monday reported that the accounting firm could face civil fraud charges in connection with its role in the 2008 collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers. 498 executives from an array of industries participated in the survey, which was conducted by Argyle Executive Forum, a New York-based professional services firm. Fewer than a third of respondents (27.3 percent) say the New York attorney general shouldn't move ahead with charges, and another quarter (24.3 percent) say they aren't sure.

The Washington State Investment Board has edged above its target allocation to private equity, with investments accounting for 25.3 percent of its $56.3 billion portfolio as of the end of September, according to sister publication Buyouts magazine. Its target allocation is 25 percent. The deep-pocketed state's PE holdings, which date back to 1981, were valued at an estimated $13.8 billion at the end of March, according to data on the investment board's Web site. The portfolio at that point consisted of interests in 245 funds to which the state state had committed an estimated $32.5 billion. Of that, PE firms had drawn down an estimated $27.6 billion and returned $24.5 billion. Older funds that appeared, as of March, to have drawn down quite a bit more than they've distributed include Frazier Healthcare IV ($40 million committed in or around 2001, $37.8 million drawn down, $13.2 million distributed), OVP Venture Partners VI ($40 million committed in or around 2001, $40 million drawn down, and $5.6 million distributed), and Green Equity Investors IV ($100 million committed in or around 2003, $107.4 million drawn down and $36.1 million distributed).

Nothing like a column on carried interest to stir up a hornet’s nest of stinging commenters. Earlier this week Richard Beales, a Reuters Breakingviews columnist, opined in our Vox Populi space that congress erred in dropping, at least temporarily, its proposal to raise taxes on carried interest. Beales is hardly alone: Even billionaire Peter G. Peterson, co-founder of the Blackstone Group and long-time beneficiary of the current tax treatment, recently said in an interview that carried interest should be taxed as regular income. Still, that view didn’t sit well with many of our commenters: