Fundraising and regulatory assistance are euphemisms for mobilizing connections and greasing hurdles.
The firm said the former House speaker would help with raising a $100 million fund to invest in businesses in the southeastern region of the U.S.
Along with helping raise the new fund, Mr. Gingrich will work with the companies that JAM Capital plans to acquire and assist them with regulatory issues, said Mr. McCallum.
"a highly reputable executive with a just as reputable private equity firm was arrested and charged with securities fraud. Andrew Caspersen, a Harvard Law School graduate and a partner at the Park Hill Group, an advisory firm that up until last fall had been a part of the Blackstone Group, was accused of defrauding numerous institutional investors out of $95 million through fake private equity investments.Private equity is overly image conscious. In the case of Andrew Caspersen there was no substance behind the image. He wagered his ill begotten gains, losing them in options trading.
Pt Capital, an Anchorage-based private equity firm investing exclusively in four Arctic countries, announced this week that it attracted more than $125 million to its inaugural fund.ADN disclosed:
Pt Arctic Fund I requires a minimum investment of $10 million and promises a compounded annual return of at least 20 percent, according to its brochure, filed in November with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Alaska Dispatch News publisher Alice Rogoff is a senior adviser for Pt Capital and holds founding stock in the parent company.Rogoff's ADN and Pt Capital held an Arctic Circle Summit on Alaskan Shipping and Ports the week before President Obama dined at Alice Rogoff's home.
The fund is bullish on the idea that a warming Arctic will eventually open up a wealth of development opportunities in the oil, gas and shipping sectors in the next two to three decades.
The purpose of the meeting was to build partnerships to develop safe and reliable shipping through the Alaskan Arctic. These partnerships will be necessary to finance needed ports of refuge, search and rescue equipment, transshipment facilities and icebreakers.On the morning of Day 1 Rogoff opened with:
I want to take one quick thank you to our sponsors.... Last but not least I want to say a quick word about Pt Capital... For those of you who don't know Pt Capital is a brand new private equity firm in Alaska. Well, I'm not sure what brand new means, but new on the scene and they are really borne out of our Arctic conferences. It's one of the most tangible things that we've done. We'll have boots on the ground in the Arctic. They're dedicated to Alaska and the Arctic. It's where their investment dollars will go.Rogoff is Senior Advisor and part owner of Pt Capital via her founders' stock. She owns the Alaskan Dispatch News, the largest newspaper in Alaska. Rogoff shamelessly promoted both as the eyes of the world turned to Alaska and President Obama's visit.
At Alaska Dispatch News – the company – we have a split identity. Of course, first and foremost, we are a news organization. But we’re also a living, breathing small business (or medium size, really, given our 200-plus employees).Rogoff committed to producing a physical newspaper for fifteen years. Alaskans will have news they can touch and feel. Otherwise ADN sounds like an advertising driven organization.
This is an update about the state of our business, and some thoughts about our future.
As most of you appreciate, as a business, what we “sell” is not just news but advertising and marketing tools for you to reach our readers. And as our industry evolves, we are growing to offer a more complicated and nuanced set of products.That's the same BP that brought Americans the 2011 Gulf Oil Spew (which killed eleven people), the 2005 Texas City Refinery explosion (that killed fifteen and injured 180 people) and three Alaska pipeline spills, two in 2006 and the other in 2009. It's the BP that gave CEO Bob Dudley a 20% increase in executive pay for sacking 7,000 jobs and getting BP the biggest financial loss in the company's sordid history.
Some even reach beyond the bounds of our own website and print publications. For example, readers and advertisers alike have been enjoying the sponsored giveaways hosted on our social media accounts. We are also helping our Alaska advertisers take their messages beyond adn.com by offering “programmatic” ad campaigns on the web managed in real time by our own in-house ad staff.
You may also have noticed what we call “Sponsored Content” on our site. These stories have traveled the history of the Iditarod Trail and explored the culinary delights of Alaska-grown seafood and produce. They have celebrated the Teachers of Excellence, sponsored by BP.
We’re always looking for the next great idea for a product that provides great content to our readers and maximum exposure to Alaska businesses.I don't believe the ADN has a split identity at all. It's a tool for development, both energy and economic. The future is profits. That means not digging to find private equity bribes to access public pension funds. The Carlyle Group and Riverstone paid a combined $70 million to make a New York pension fund investigation go away.
The episode became known in Washington business lore as the Great Eskimo Tax ScamI'm afraid Alaskan investment is for the taking and Rogoff's newspaper will not act as a public counterbalance, much less an investigative entity. Alaskans themselves will need to be wary of who is behind what and why. Greed is the norm in today's investment world.
Banks are increasingly turning down companies seeking financing to pay for debt-laden takeovers after the recent market rout left them saddled with debt from earlier deals.They highlighted banks balking over Carlyle Group's Veritas buyout:
Credit Suisse Group AG, Jefferies Group LLC and Wells Fargo & Co. are among the firms turning down new requests for financing—typically from low-rated companies—as they retreat from the lucrative but risky business of backing debt-heavy buyouts, people familiar with the matter say.
In November, a group including Bank of America Corp., Morgan Stanley, UBS Group AG and Jefferies struggled to sell about $5 billion of loans and bonds they had guaranteed for Carlyle Group LP’s $8 billion buyout of Symantec Corp.’s Veritas data-storage unit, according to people familiar with the matter. Investors balked at buying the debt after Veritas reported a sharp decline in quarterly earnings, the people said.The market for buying and selling companies cycles based on corporate valuations and deal financing. Investors are smacking down junk this NCAA basketball tournament season. Ironically the East final will be played in the Wells Fargo Center.
Carlyle ultimately renegotiated the deal in January at a price about $1 billion lower. Even so, the banks have yet to sell the loans and would face a loss of at least $250 million if they tried to unload the debt in current market conditions, bankers say.
“The Commercial Energy Working Group is one of the most active – and secret – organizations seeking to undermine energy market regulations,” Slocum told The Intercept. “The purpose of my complaint is to force the group to start identifying its membership.”The group filed its first lobbying disclosure in 2013 However the Working Group of Commercial Energy Firms has been influencing public policy since 2010. The group wrote the Secretary of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission a number of times to influence swaps regulation under Dodd-Frank:
Under the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, all lobbying organizations registered with the federal government must list the names of any business that has contributed more than $5,000 to them in any one quarter. But the CEWG “does not disclose the individual companies or entities that constitute its active membership,” according to Slocum’s letter.
August 19, 2010 - Rule making for Futures Commission MerchantsLawyer Alexander Holtan migrated from Hunton Williams to Sutherland, Asbill Brennan in 2013. That's when the group changed names and began filing lobbying reports.
October 22, 2010 - Registration Requirements
November 5, 2010 - Definition of Commercial Risk
March 22, 2011 - Rule making under Title VII
January 19, 2012 - Bloomberg article on Swaps Lobbying
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission reauthorization; regulation of derivatives; treatment of derivatives and physical commodities in bankruptcy; and H.R. 2289, the Commodity End-User Relief Act.Bets on energy commodities are far from TV, movie or music territory. But there may be a good story in this mess. Vitol, a member of the Commercial Energy Working Group by attendance at meetings with the CFTC, recently did a joint venture deal with The Carlyle Group on Varo Energy.
“His vision was to combine capital with politically connected people whose phone calls are accepted around the world."
Carlyle co-founder David Rubenstein hosted Vice President Joe Biden on Thanksgiving and dined numerous times with President Obama, as did Rubenstein's wife Alice Rogoff during Obama's Alaska trip.
Seeking Alpha reported Carlyle and Vitol were the first exporters of U.S. oil to Europe. Together Carlyle and Vitol have an insider on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Vitol's Ron Oppenheimer. Besides being a regulator Oppenheimer is part of the secretive Commercial Energy Working Group.
Welcome to the Government-Corporate Monstrosity, Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex on trillions in federal steroids.
Update 4-13-22: Carlyle doubled its stake in Varo in February 2021.
Two subsidiaries of Farmington-based United Technologies Corp. are shutting heating and ventilating parts manufacturing plants in Indiana, eliminating more than 2,000 jobs as operations move to Mexico.United Technologies CEO Gregory Hayes garnered an individual performance highlight for 2015. The board praised him for his:
Carrier, a manufacturer of heating, ventilating, air conditioning and refrigeration, said it will relocate its Indianapolis manufacturing operations to a site near its manufacturing plants in Monterrey, Mexico, over three years beginning in 2017.
Rigorous commitment to a disciplined capital allocation strategy, evidenced by the $12 billion we returned to shareowners in 2015 through dividends and share repurchases (including the $6 billion accelerated share buyback program announced in November 2015)Hayes' disciplined capital allocation strategy earned him over $10.7 million in executive compensation for 2015. That's significant capital allocated to his personal pocketbook at the expense of other company workers.
The 2015 EPS results of $8.61 per share included discontinued operations and the gain realized from the sale of Sikorsky Aircraft. The Committee excluded discontinued operations from EPS, which includes this gain, for PSU vesting measurement purposes. This resulted in an EPS from continuing operations of $4.53. The Committee made additional adjustments to exclude restructuring, non-recurring, and other significant, defined items unrelated to operational performance (see Appendix B on page 86 for details), resulting in an adjusted EPS of $6.30 and a vesting factor of 88%.Move 2,100 jobs to Mexico at $3 an hour and how much might CEO Hayes earn in performance share units? The global race to the bottom only applies to worker pay and benefits. Executives stack each others' boards and dole out a plethora of high priced goodies. In the case of UTX perks include an executive physical, leased car and $16,000 for financial planning.