News & Analysis

BC Partners makes top management changes

Chairman Jens Reidel has stepped down as part of a planned retirement process, handing co-chairman roles to managing partners Francesco Loredan and Raymond Svider. Next month John Hosgood, Barclays’ former co-head of leveraged finance, will join the firm to lead a push into credit strategies that will be largely focused on purchasing debt in its own deals.

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Jens Reidel is winding down his 17-year career with BC Partners, having relinquished the chairman role he accepted in 2004.

The move is part of Reidel’s planned retirement and in-line with the firm’s history of “smooth and successful management successions”, said managing partner Raymond Svider.

Former managing partner Simon Palley retired in late 2007. While ex-managing partners Michel Guillet, John Burgess and Alberto Tazartes retired in 2004 and 2005. This followed the retirement in 2001 of co-founders Otto van der Wyck and Patrice Hoppenot.

We're not looking to become the next kings of the debt market.

Andrew Newington

New York-based Svider is now co-chairman along with fellow managing partner Francesco Loredan. Svider joined BCP in 1992 from Wasserstein Perella and has been leading the firm’s North American push. Loredan established BCP’s Milan office in 1989 and is now based in Geneva. They are two of the firm's nine managing partners.

The management shuffle comes days after the firm said it hired Goldman Sachs veteran Charlie Bott to take the investors relations helm from Kevin O’Donohue. From April, Bott will be a co-head alongside O’Donohue, who then plans to retire at the year’s end. During his 22-year tenure at Goldman Sachs, Bott chaired the bank’s European financial sponsors group and established the bank’s relationships with the likes of Apax Partners, Cinven, Providence Equity Partners and BC Partners.

In a press briefing today at BCP's London office – full coverage of which will appear tomorrow in PEO’s Friday Letter – BCP also revealed it has hired Jonathan Hosgood, Barclays Capital’s former co-head of sponsor origination and finance.

Hosgood joins next month as a partner and will lead BCP’s push into investing in debt securities. Managing partner Andrew Newington said the firm has received limited partner approval to make “up to several hundred million” in such investments from its current fund, which closed on €5.9 billion in 2005 and is 54 percent committed.

The credit investments would primarily relate to debt tied to its own private equity deals, given attractive pricing in today’s market, he said. Newington cautioned, however, “We’re not looking to become the next kings of the debt market.” He said the firm may end up making no such investments, but simply wants the flexibility to invest across capital structures that some other private equity firms enjoy.