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There's a parody email circulating around Wall Street right now, in which dialogue from A Few Good Men is turned into Goldman Sachs fodder. Here's a snippet: You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth. Son, we live in a country with an investment gap. And that gap needs to be filled by men with money. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Middle Class Consumer? Goldman Sachs has a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. So I decided to try my hand at something similar, with the scene in which Danny Kaffee (Tom Cruise) and Jack Ross (Kevin Bacon) discuss the possibility of Kaffee putting Col. Jessop on the stand. Standing in for Kaffee will be SEC chair Mary Shapiro, while Goldman counsel Gregory Palm gets the Ross treatment. Get it after the jump...

Perhaps no private equity group was closer to the global financial crisis' epicenter than was AIG Investments (now rebranded as PineBridge Investments). The past 18 months have been a roller coaster for the institution, culminating in its announced sale to Hong Kong-based investor Pacific Century Group. All the while, it continued to make investments and never missed a capital call. Bob Thompson, head of alternatives for PineBridge Investments, comes to Buyouts West on April 15, to tell this story. In a pre-conference interview, he talks about buzz words he does and doesn’t like, the likelihood of PE shops merging with each other, and lessons learned as having been part of AIG over the last 18 months:

Scratch any pitch these days and you’ll find a team that’s touting its ability to manage through a recession. You will hear that they were once, or still are, card carrying members of the Fearlessly Hand Dirtying Sleeve Roll Uppers of America. All the same, that much coveted quality of legitimate operational experience seems today […]

Not even Africa is off limits for finding big buyout returns. Pan-African growth equity firm Emerging Capital Partners scored a pair of lucrative exits in the last two months, the most recent being the sale of Societe Internationale de Plantations D’Heveas, a rubber maker with operations in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. ECP, a Washington […]

The Middle East has been enchanting LBO firms lately, notably The Blackstone Group and Ares Management. Blackstone will be closing its fifth fund – at last – with a little over $22 billion at the end of the July, a source tells Buyouts. After reopening the $15.6 billion fifth fund last fall, Schwarzman was spotted on the […]

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. is beginning to talk to LPs about raising its next European fund, following a spate of big-ticket overseas buyouts. We haven’t yet heard a specific target, but it’s likely to be much larger than its previous EUR 4.5 billion vehicle. At least one major LP told Buyouts Magazine it would be […]

LPs in Sun Capital’s next fund are looking at a different kind of 4x return. Return 4x what you committed to Sun’s last fund. Sun Capital’s latest fund will close on $6B in early April, rocking its $4B target and quadrupling what it raised in 2005. With that, the firm has just joined the illustrious ranks, along […]

Lots of news today to be posted on buyoutsnews.com. One is that CarVal Investors LLC, the distressed investment arm of conglomerate Cargill Inc., is preparing to close on $5 billion for its first distressed fund accepting capital from outside investors, according to an LP in the fund. Cargill will be plowing 40 percent of its […]

A Biomet Inc. shareholder has sued four private equity firms — Blackstone Group, Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and Texas Pacific Group — and the company’s board of directors over a proposed $10.9 billion buyout. You can read the complaint here: Lawsuit against Biomet and Four PE Funds.pdf The lawsuit’s claims are typical […]

This week at Buyouts we’re writing about placement agents and I’ve begun thinking over the issue of how important it is to get placement agents to diversify LP bases for GPs. The basic premise is that if your LP base is diversified, then when a certain geographic area gets hot (the way Canada, Australia and […]