Word: german
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Hanns Ostmeier was stunned to pick up a popular German newspaper one recent Sunday and find a photo of himself along with several colleagues in a mock WANTED poster. Ostmeier's offense: he runs the German operations for the Blackstone Group, the big U.S. buyout firm. Blackstone isn't exactly a household name in Germany. But this spring, a top German politician named Franz Müntefering likened Blackstone and other private-equity groups to "swarms of locusts" that fall on companies and devour all they can before moving on. "Some financial investors don't waste any thoughts on the people...
...trampling over Europe seems misplaced. While some of the major U.S. investors have Americans on staff in Europe, their public face is usually local. "We are not showing up with a cowboy hat," says the principal of one U.S. fund. Ostmeier, for example, who is based in Hamburg, is German, a former management consultant with Boston Consulting Group in Düsseldorf. He spent seven years working for a London-based European private-equity group before he joined Blackstone in 2003. Jean-Pierre Millet, who runs Carlyle's European operations out of Paris, is the first non-American to work...
Foreign investment firms have incentives to improve, not destroy, the businesses they buy. Wincor Nixdorf is a case in point. The German firm, which makes ATMs for banks, was singled out by the SPD's Müntefering in his "locust" critique because of the profits that its investors, KKR and Goldman Sachs, made when they sold out. The two firms acquired Wincor Nixdorf from Siemens in 1999 for $709 million and by the beginning of the year had sold their entire stake, starting with a public offering in 2004. KKR and Goldman haven't disclosed details, but people familiar with...
...groups, simply "brought to light what others obviously wanted to leave in the dark"--and has every intention of shining more lights on the phenomenon. It's not just labor that is complaining. Blackstone made such a big return--more than $3 billion--from its investment in German chemical fiber company Celanese, which it acquired and quickly took public again in the U.S., that it has drawn the ire of a New York City--based hedge fund, Paulson & Co., which alleges that the initial deal wasn't fairly valued. And some private-equity firms are starting to fret that...
Valerie Plame used to live hidden in plain sight. The brick house she and her husband, Joseph Wilson, bought in May of 1998 is on a leafy, Washington, D.C. side-street, a few turns from the German Embassy, and fits right in with the other well-to-do homes around it. The open garage door displays the common items of family life: bicycles, kids' toys, garbage cans. Wilson's convertible Jaguar sits parked in the driveway. A paved walkway cuts through a manicured lawn to the front door, behind which children can be heard playing. But the slim, attractive woman...