Citigroup Said to Plan Sale of $10 Billion Private-Equity Unit

Citigroup Said to Plan Sale of $10 Billion Private-Equity Unit


Feb. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Citigroup Inc. plans to sell or split off its $10 billion Citi Private Equity unit, expanding the list of money-management businesses the U.S. bank is disposing of to reduce debt, people familiar with the matter said.

Citi Private Equity, which takes minority stakes in companies and invests in other buyout funds, oversees about $2 billion of Citigroup’s money, said the people, who declined to be identified because the sale talks are private. The rest is from outside investors. Managers of the decade-old unit, led by Todd Benson and Darren Friedman, have discussed buying it for themselves alongside new partners or with other financing, one person said.

Citigroup, 27 percent owned by the government following a bailout in 2008, is selling almost a third of its $1.86 trillion of assets under regulatory pressure to shrink. Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit plans to keep a smaller buyout unit the bank bought in late 2007, a few months after he joined, the people said.

“Citi has been going in and out of these different investing vehicles, both private equity and hedge funds,” said Steven Kaplan, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business who studies the private-equity industry. “It’s been a game of musical chairs.”

Benson and Friedman stepped in as co-heads of Citi Private Equity after the January 2009 departure of John Barber, who had led the unit for nine years. Neither of the co-heads returned calls for comment, and Citigroup spokeswoman Shannon Bell declined to comment.

Metalmark to Stay

Other money-management units marked for sale or closure include the Citi Property Investors real-estate unit, which oversees $12.5 billion; and the Hedge Fund Management Group, which allocates money to hedge funds on behalf of its own investors, the people said.

Citigroup plans to keep Metalmark Capital LLC, a buyout firm the bank agreed to buy for an undisclosed sum in December 2007. Headed by former Morgan Stanley executive Howard Hoffen, Metalmark oversees almost $3.8 billion in several funds, one person said. It invests in energy, health care, financial and industrial companies, according to Metalmark’s Web site.

Pandit, 53, decided to keep Metalmark because he preferred its management and strategy to those of Citi Private Equity, three people said. Both Pandit and John Havens, who heads Citigroup’s trading- and investment-banking division, worked with Hoffen at Morgan Stanley from the late 1980s through the early 2000s.

Dorfman, O’Brien

The bank also is keeping another fund, Citi Venture Capital International, which focuses on China, India, Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America.

Citigroup’s hedge-fund and buyout division, Citi Capital Advisors, is run by Jonathan Dorfman and James O’Brien, another pair of former Morgan Stanley executives who joined Citigroup when it bought their hedge fund in October 2007. Four of Citigroup’s most senior executives previously took turns leading the division, including Pandit, Havens and Vice Chairmen Lewis Kaden and Edward “Ned” Kelly.

Citi Capital Advisors has about $14 billion under management, a figure that excludes the funds earmarked for disposal, people familiar with the matter said. At the end of 2007, the division oversaw $73 billion. More than a dozen funds were shuttered or frozen, including Pandit’s Old Lane Partners fund, which Citigroup bought in 2007 for $800 million. The bank stopped reporting the alternative-investing division’s results after the first quarter of 2008, when it had a net loss of $509 million.

Decision in 2009

The decision to sell Citi Private Equity was made last year, before President Barack Obama on Jan. 21 proposed banks be forced to divest their private-equity firms and hedge funds, the people familiar with the matter said. Ownership of such businesses can expose taxpayers to the risk of further bank bailouts, according to the White House.

A person close to Citigroup said its private-equity business doesn’t conflict with the proposal, since most investing is done on behalf of customers and little of the bank’s own capital is put at risk. Citigroup counts its remaining buyout and hedge funds among “core” operations that also include banking, trading, securities underwriting and credit cards.

Depending on how the new laws or regulations are written, Citigroup may have to overhaul its private-equity business again, said Calyon Securities USA analyst Michael Mayo, who rates Citigroup shares “underperform.”

Dollar General, GMAC

“None of this is set in stone,” Mayo said in an interview.

Citi Private Equity was formed in 2000. Early in the decade, the unit was used partly to consolidate investments inherited from the 1998 merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group Inc., people familiar with the matter said. In February 2007, Citi Private Equity raised about $3.3 billion of new funding.

Citigroup doesn’t publicly disclose the performance of Citi Private Equity. Managers of such funds typically charge fees for overseeing investors’ money and take a fixed cut of any capital gains.

The unit was a secondary investor on New York-based buyout firm KKR & Co.’s $7.3 billion takeover of discount retailer Dollar General Corp. in July 2007. Goodlettsville, Tennessee- based Dollar General went public through an initial stock offering last November, and now has a market value of about $8 billion.

Not as profitable was a supporting equity investment in New York-based Cerberus Capital Management LP’s takeover of auto- finance company GMAC LLC, people familiar with the matter say. Like Citigroup, GMAC had to get a series of infusions from the U.S. government as surging unemployment drove up consumer-loan defaults. In November, Michael Carpenter, who ran Citigroup’s hedge fund and buyout unit before he quit in 2006, was tapped as GMAC’s new CEO.

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