Our April cover story on succession planning; Stats on LP liquidity

Succession planning and the CFO; PEI’s senior editor weighs in on LP liquidity; Pandemic changes the way some will do business in future; Partners Group diverts executive salaries; Update to secondaries law firm database.

LP Liquidity: Toby Mitchenall has some insight into LP liquidity in his Friday letter, including some very interesting data from Colmore, a provider of LP portfolio monitoring services, and consultant bfinance.

I will also add that that I hear, anecdotally (read: unconfirmed rumor) that some large managers have pushed back their capital calls to ease LP concerns, and one banker active in subscription lines tells me that some of the biggest banks in the space have reported to him they have seen no LP defaults. Another banker had his bank’s legal team look into it, and they came back “unworried”. So indications are, these two were isolated situations. That said, Devlin (the lawyer quoted in the article) and others I have spoken to have expressed the possibility of further defaults – though none have said they expect it to come from large institutional LPs.

Succession: Taking a little break from pandemic coverage, we bring you our April issue, ready to download on the site. In it, you’ll find our cover story on succession planning and the role of the CFO in the process. I spoke to consultants, CFOs and lawyers to get some insight on how to get the conversation going, why it’s important, various approaches to the difficult art of compensation and even development, retention and planning for finance teams. I found the topic fascinating to report on, and I hope you enjoy reading it!

Survey: More from Private Equity International’s exclusive survey of managers’ and investors’ thoughts on the covid-19 pandemic. Connor Hussey highlights that the recent upheaval has indeed changed the way some will conduct business in the future.

Stepping up: Private Equity International has a story on Partners Group executives forgoing 100 percent of their base salaries for the next six months to support their portfolio companies. There’s been a lot of talk about PE repairing its image in the face of increased public scrutiny, and there have been some notable steps to do good during this crisis, but, at least to my knowledge, this is unprecedented. Partners is also considering setting up a hardship fund.

Secondaries law firms: We’ve updated out database of law firms with secondaries experience.

Email prepared by Graham Bippart