Valuation committee best practice, ACG PERT-style

Blinn Cirella, CFO of Saw Mill Capital, is on the steering committee of ACG’s Private Equity Regulatory Task Force (PERT) and co-wrote the group’s best practice guidelines on valuations. She has given us a window on how her firm operates its valuation committee; what started as a compliance exercise became a “useful exercise that ensures discipline and consistence.”

Elsewhere, we have gathered CFO views on one of the meatier parts of the Stop Wall Street Looting Act: the proposal to make private equity firms liable for portfolio company debt. “The goal of the proposal is to limit aggressive overleveraging of portfolio companies,” one CFO tells Brian Bonilla, “but as drafted, it will limit all private equity investing.”

Academic and columnist Noah Smith argues in this Bloomberg column that the liability measures are the only parts of the act that do not make sense.

Email prepared by Toby Mitchenall.