HSBC’s chair search ends where it began

One scoop to start: One of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds is suing a US private equity firm, accusing it of attempting to short-change investors on the sale of a portfolio company to another one of its funds.

And another: Bond investors have told the US Treasury they are concerned about Kevin Hassett’s potential appointment as Federal Reserve chair, worrying he will cut interest rates aggressively to please President Donald Trump.

And another thing: One of the largest middle men in First Brands’ financings has said that “a lot of people made a lot of money” lending to the bankrupt car parts maker, as they chased the high yields that it paid on its debt.

In today’s newsletter:

HSBC board completes chair search but continues soul search

After hearing pitches from high-profile names such as Goldman Sachs executive Kevin Sneader and ex-UK chancellor George Osborne, the HSBC board ended its chaotic search for a new chair right back where it had started.

On Wednesday the board announced it had unanimously decided to hand the job to Brendan Nelson, a former KPMG partner who has been in the role as interim chair since October.

The way the process unfolded is likely to raise questions about the effectiveness of the board at one of London’s largest listed companies.

For those who haven’t been following, HSBC just conducted one of the messiest chair searches in recent memory. In fact, the last time a bank fumbled a succession process this badly may have been HSBC itself 15 years ago.

A confluence of factors made the process particularly difficult for the board.

Former chair Sir Mark Tucker’s surprise announcement earlier this year that he would leave at the end of September — about a year earlier than initially planned — left the board rushing to fill one of the highest-profile and most demanding roles in banking.

Despite wading through about 100 names, HSBC’s leadership was pressed to find executives who had: (1) financial services experience (2) intimate knowledge of China (3) diplomat-like skills to navigate a fraught relationship between the US and China (4) the time and energy to do a job with a gruelling travel schedule that pays far below what most of them are taking in.

In fairness, the board did try to loosen up a bit on the required skills. But then they couldn’t agree on whether a candidate actually had them or not. 

Was living in Hong Kong “Asia experience” as it pertains to HSBC or did living somewhere else in Asia also count? Did living in Asia necessarily mean that the person could wield power in Beijing? 

They got around those questions by landing on Nelson, who has essentially no Asia experience to disagree on.

But we may all be back here very soon. Nelson, who is 76-years-old, is unlikely to see the job through a six or nine year term and this could be a way for the board to conduct another process out of the spotlight.

Blue Owl spends $200mn to boost its stocks

It’s been a wild month for private credit giant Blue Owl.

After floating a merger of two of its funds early in November, it was forced to backtrack after an FT report outlined how the deal could leave some investors with large haircuts. 

Shares in Blue Owl and its public credit funds slumped through much of the month as Wall Street grappled with the aborted deal, amid rising fears of falling yields and rising defaults hitting debt markets.

But Blue Owl has been adamant that the market is overly bearish on the New York-based asset manager, which is one of the largest lenders globally to data centres and software companies. 

It has paraded out executives to financial media to dispute assertions that “cockroaches” lie in private credit portfolios amid an over 30 per cent slide in the alternative asset manager’s share price this year. 

On Tuesday evening, Blue Owl disclosed that it has repurchased $200mn in stock across three of its public companies: its asset manager and its two largest publicly traded credit funds. 

The stock purchases included about $35mn coming from company executives and rank-and-file employees, Blue Owl said, and are being used to close large discounts to their reported valuations, one of the key factors for its heartburn over the past month.

As DD’s Antoine Gara reported, the New York-based asset manager had proposed merging its inaugural private credit fund for retail investors with its far larger public fund, OBDC. 

But the structure would have left investors with a 20 per cent haircut, given the acquiring fund’s trading discount. 

The $200mn in stock purchases have driven a recovery in the trading prices of Blue Owl’s companies. But whether the gains are enduring will be the big test.

The Italian company bringing financial engineering to Europe

One of Europe’s hottest private companies, backed by the investment fund Baillie Gifford and telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel, wants the continent to embrace technological dynamism and create a rival to Silicon Valley.

But the American tradition that Milan-based Bending Spoons appears to be adopting is Wall Street-style financial engineering.

In recent years the company, which reached an $11bn valuation this autumn, has been on a buying spree of digital commerce IPOs and under-appreciated internet companies.

Its latest target is Eventbrite, the online ticketing platform, which Bending Spoons announced this week that it’s buying for $500mn.

Earlier this year it bought Vimeo, the video platform, for $1.4bn. Before that it took the streaming technology company Brightcove private for $233mn.

The portfolio doesn’t exactly scream tech dynamism. (In October the company announced it was buying AOL, the software company famed for the internet dial-up service it retired in September.)

But investors — among them also Fidelity, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and celebrity Bradley Cooper — may instead be looking to the company’s financial innovations.

Bending Spoons paid a large premium for the companies it took private, albeit based on depressed stock prices.

Eventbrite, Vimeo and Brightcove listed in an era when investors were more tolerant of growth companies with fuzzy business models. In the case of Eventbrite, its shares have fallen almost 90 per cent since its 2018 IPO.

Bending Spoons — named for a mind-control scene in The Matrix — is betting smart management and a roll-up strategy such as those more commonly seen in the US can restore value to the internet zombies.

Even if the valuations never recover, Bending Spoons thinks it can squeeze out profits from the steady cash flows of the subscription-based companies, forever.

That’s where it diverges in a key way from US-based private equity companies: Bending Spoons claims it never plans to sell.

Job moves

• H/Advisors Abernathy’s chief executive Tom Johnson is leaving the communications firm. He’s being replaced on an interim basis by Carina Davidson, who’s worked at the company for almost three decades.

• Jeroen van Kwawegen has left Bernstein, Litowitz, Berger and Grossmann, where he headed the corporate governance litigation practice, to start his own practice, JVK Law. He was a member of the BLBG team that successfully sued Tesla to block the $55bn pay package for Elon Musk.

• Wilson Sonsini managing partner Doug Clark is retiring after leading the firm since 2012. Partners Caz Hashemi and Megan Baier will take over as managing partners in August.

• JPMorgan has announced a leadership shake-up in its equity capital markets business. Ashish Jhajharia will become head of ECM in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Vittorio Rivaroli will become head of continental Europe ECM. And Paul Mihailovitch and Stefan Weiner have been appointed as vice-chairs of capital markets.

Smart reads

Strategic reset Investors could be forgiven for growing impatient with Strategy, FT Alphaville writes, as bitcoin’s biggest corporate evangelist sells shares to build a dollar reserve.

Market return After getting a well-timed loan from the Trump administration and winning unexpected election victories in October, Argentine President Javier Milei’s government is preparing to issue foreign bonds for the first time in years, Bloomberg writes. It’s a stunning change in sentiment since September.

State capital Another company backed by Donald Trump Jr’s venture capital firm has landed a US government contract, the FT reports.

News round-up

Ovo founder aims to retake control after proposing £200mn investment (FT)

Glencore slashes 1,000 jobs as part of cost-cutting drive (FT)

Trump sons’ bitcoin venture sheds almost 40% of its value in crypto turmoil (FT)

Binance names co-founder Yi He as co-chief executive (FT)

AI era requires ‘totally different’ approach to regulation, says FCA boss (FT)

Meta poaches senior Apple designer Alan Dye to support AI glasses push (FT)

Activist campaigns more likely to target female CEOs (FT)