In brief people news

Following the decision to acquire Tandem Private Equity, Mithras Investment Trust says it intends to create Mithras Private Equity LLP, a private equity fund-of-funds management company. This latest phase in the development of Mithras follows a series of changes that have led to a substantial turnaround in the company’s fortunes since 2000. These include a shift in investment focus from mezzanine to equity finance, direct investment in LGV funds and increased liquidity through paying off debt. Mithras Private Equity will be headed by Gillian Brown, founder of Tandem. Brown brings with her 19 years’ experience in investing in private equity, and she was formerly head of the private equity funds team at Hermes Private Equity. Prior to working at Hermes, Brown was a director of Merrill Lynch Investment Managers Private Equity Partners investment team. Over this time she has built an extensive network of contacts with managers of private equity funds, which allows her to make investments in both difficult-to-access funds run by the well-established managers, and newer and lesser-known funds run by high quality managers.

• BNP Paribas has hired David Beavis and John Malet de Carteret to its leveraged finance and media and telecom origination team, part of EMEA loan syndications and trading, headed by Julian van Kan. Beavis joined in December from BNP Paribas’s London leveraged finance division, with John Malet de Carteret joining at the end of February from CIBC, where he was an executive director within the leveraged finance team. Both will be based in London and will report to Charlotte Conlan, head of leveraged finance and media and telecom origination.
• ING has appointed Thomas Lagemann, managing director, as head of the group’s leveraged finance and sponsor coverage group covering Germany, Switzerland and Austria. He takes up his new post with immediate effect and reports to Pierre Chabrelie, global head of leveraged finance and sponsor coverage. Lagemann joins from ING’s telecom and media finance team, where he secured leading roles on some of the bank’s key leveraged transactions.
• Intermediate Capital Group (ICG), the European mezzanine provider, has appointed Aleksander Marcin Ferenc to a newly created role as assistant director responsible for originating and executing new mezzanine investments in the Central and Eastern European market. From May 1999 to the end of 2006, Ferenc was an investment director at Baring Private Equity Partners, managing the €86m Baring Central European Fund. He has a PhD from the Warsaw University of Technology and an MBA in finance from the Manchester Business School.