Barclays Plc said Rob Edgell and Kassem Shafi will take over as co-heads of its mergers-and-acquisitions sell-side advisory business in the Americas as it looks to work on more private equity exits and corporate divestitures.
(Bloomberg) — Barclays Plc said Rob Edgell and Kassem Shafi will take over as co-heads of its mergers-and-acquisitions sell-side advisory business in the Americas as it looks to work on more private equity exits and corporate divestitures.
Edgell, who joined the British lender through a predecessor firm in 2006, was added to the sell-side advisory team in 2021 and has worked on transactions involving Chevron Corp. and Toshiba Corp., according to a memo to staff seen by Bloomberg News. Shafi, who joined Barclays in 2019, will relocate to New York and retain his role as global head of private capital advisory.
Since Shafi joined Barclays, the firm has helped to arrange a number of so-called continuation vehicles, according to the memo. Private equity firms often use these funds when they want to keep managing assets in traditional buyout funds that are about to mature — often to avoid taking portfolio companies public before they’re ready or selling them at unfavorable prices.
“As sell-side processes increasingly include continuation vehicles and other bespoke solutions involving non-traditional buyers, the combination of Barclays’ historically strong sell-side effort with its distinctive capability in structuring continuation vehicles and other private capital solutions will provide a truly differentiated offering for our sponsor and corporate clients,” Ihsan Essaid and Gary Posternack, Barclays’s co-heads of global mergers and acquisitions, said in the memo.
The bank’s move comes as investors await a broad rebound in private equity investment and merger-and-acquisition activity. Industrywide deal volumes slowed to $559 billion in the first quarter of the year, amounting to the third-lowest volume in a single quarter this decade, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Still, $181.8 billion of that amount, covering some 4,200 deals, involved at least one private equity firm.
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