Steve Bills

CI Capital Partners LLC has closed the guest book for its first institutional fund. The New York firm announced this month it held a final close for its CI Capital Investors II LP fund with $620 million in commitments, exceeding its $500 million target. But Steven M. Lefkowitz, the president of CI Capital Partners, told […]

With the collateralized loan obligation market still in disarray, Churchill Financial Group LLC has decided to organize a business development company. The New York leveraged lender plans to raise up to $150 million for the vehicle, which is to be called Churchill Financial BDC Inc., according to a regulatory filing. The new company, which will […]

Benchmarking private equity fund performance is a notoriously slippery effort, with a variety of data providers, including our publisher, Thomson Reuters, generating results that can be widely divergent from one another. The newest player, poised to enter the game this month, is The Burgiss Group of Hoboken, NJ, a software developer and consultant to the alternative investment market. The company plans a Good Friday launch of an online benchmarking product, Private iQ, with data on 3,000 funds current through the end of 2010. (Have you tried it? If so, please let us know what you think ...

Mid-market LBO dealflow disappointed lenders in the first quarter, according to Thomson Reuters LPC, a sister service of peHUB that tracks the loan market. With volume of less than $4 billion, activity was down 40% from the fourth quarter of 2010, according to LPC data. As a result, lenders have become more aggressive. Instead of the 3.5x to 4.5x EBITDA multiples that have been common, some new deals have offered 5x or even 6x EBITDA, LPC found. Follow the link for the video report by LPC’s Fran Beyers.

Cerberus Capital Management LP will do its leveraged lending under its own name or through its Ableco Finance LLC affiliate, peHUB sister publication Buyouts has learned. The New York megafund has decided to shutter phase out the brand of its other lending operation, known as Dymas. In an e-mail today to customers and employees, Eric […]

Debt refinancing dominated U.S. leveraged lending in the first quarter, according to data collected by Thomson Reuters LPC, a sister service of peHUB that tracks the loan market. Refinancings include dividend recapitalizations to pay dividends to sponsors as well as straightforward refinancings designed to lower a borrower's interest rate or extend debt maturities.

It all started with a letter. Rob Morris didn't even expect a reply. "I viewed it in my mind like writing the ex-girlfriend one last letter, and I would never hear from the person," said Morris, the managing partner of Olympus Partners, a buyout shop in Stamford, Conn. Morris had no connections to Spencer Bachus, the letter's intended recipient and the chief candidate to become chairman of the House Financial Services Committee after the GOP took the House of Representatives last November. In fact, Morris had no experience dealing with Washington, D.C. But Morris had been studying provisions of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that would require private equity firms to register as investment advisers, and the registration provision struck him as a waste ...

Manufacturing has recovered strongly since the Great Recession and is likely to retain a key position in the U.S. economy, according to participants at the Association for Corporate Growth's InterGrowth conference this week in San Diego. This perspective should be reassuring for financial sponsors, who historically have favored sectors such as manufacturing, with its hard assets and generally reliable, if often unglamorous, financial performance. While the sector should continue to be a mainstay of the economy, its prospects are likely to be driven more by technological investments and automation, even as its role as a job creator continues to decline. Altus Capital Partners, a boutique buyout shop in Westport, Conn., looks for target companies that have a proprietary technology or process that can drive their growth, said Elizabeth Burgess, a senior partner at the firm, during a panel discussion on manufacturing. But the firm also must analyze the cost of maintaining the competitive edge of its portfolio companies, she said.

My colleague Alastair Goldfisher took a swing already at the venture capitalists on the Forbes list of the world's billionaires. Perhaps it's no surprise there are more dudes from the buyouts world (and way predominantly, these superwealthy folks are of the male persuasion) on this list than there are from VC. The thing that may be more surprising is that the richest of the rich in the buyouts world, although they swim in the same waters as the fund managers we focus on here, don't play with the same pools. Consider, for instance, Warren Buffet, No. 3

This supposed loan slump is looking more and more like a seasonal phenomenon to me, rather than a sign of the apocalypse. We have seen a fair amount of handwringing in 2011 about the slowdown in lending deal flow since the first of the year, both by Ron Kahn of Lincoln International here at peHUB and also by Randy Schwimmer of Churchill Financial. My colleague Bernard Vaughan has also written about the same issue at sister site Buyoutsnews.com. (Subscribers can see that report here.) The concern is that, apart from refinancings and recapitalizations, which have been booming, the volume of fresh deal flow in the leveraged lending market has been disappointing ...