Latest news with #JohnHelyar
Spectator
21-05-2025
- Business
- Spectator
It's time to get rid of the Rich List
Here's a takeover tale that captures the zeitgeist. It involves two FTSE 250 companies and some deep-pocketed US investors – and I'll explain it as simply as I can. In essence, how would you feel if your GP surgery fell into the hands of American investors associated with the book title Barbarians at the Gate? The first of the two London-listed companies is Assura, which owns 600 NHS surgeries and diagnostic facilities and has accepted a cash offer of £1.6 billion from a pair of New York investment giants. They are Stone-peak, which holds a huge global portfolio of infrastructure assets, and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, whose initials KKR may be familiar to older readers as a pioneer of aggressive private–equity dealmaking – most famously the 1989 buyout (chronicled by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar in the Barbarians bestseller) of the food and tobacco group RJR Nabisco. Imbued with Trumpist swagger, investors like these habitually prowl the London market for undervalued targets. The second company, Primary Health Properties, is the only other significant player in Assura's marketplace, as the owner of 516 GP facilities in the UK and Ireland – and has cut in to offer £1.7 billion for Assura in cash and shares. KKR claims PHP's deal will hit competition issues, though the merged company would hold a relatively small proportion of the NHS surgery estate, most of which is owned by the GPs themselves. In an era in which public markets are shrinking and private equity is rampant, largely to the detriment of smaller investors, this is a rare example of a listed company challenging the Goliath of KKR and its ilk.
Bloomberg
23-04-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Empaths at the Gate: KKR and a Stanford Psychologist Measure People Skills
In 2011, KKR & Co. bought an industrial company in Minnesota and did something unusual for a private equity firm—it invited factory workers to share ownership. A key plant with a major morale problem was losing employees and had a sky-high accident rate. Giving workers an equity stake, the thinking went, would increase loyalty, engagement and performance. The results were promising enough that KKR began issuing equity stakes to workers at other companies it owned, at first mainly in the manufacturing sector, where annual turnover rates are routinely above 40%. KKR, which manages $600 billion in assets firmwide, is most famous for leveraged buyouts, such as in the bare-knuckle battle for control of RJR Nabisco chronicled in Bryan Burrough and John Helyar's 1989 bestseller, Barbarians at the Gate. But it has an interest in the management of a vast private equity portfolio of 250 companies with a combined total of more than 850,000 employees. Today its employee ownership model is in place at more than 65 of those companies, including publishing giant Simon & Schuster LLC, and the firm's private equity business in the Americas is now pledging to bring the setup to every deal in which it buys a controlling stake.
