Private equity giant Abraaj files for liquidation

Once a rising star of the investment world, firm may become one of the industry’s largest-ever failures

By Simon Clark 

Abraaj Group, the emerging-markets private-equity firm under pressure from creditors and investors, said Thursday its Cayman Islands-based holding company filed for liquidation, in what could be one of the industry’s largest-ever failures, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Founded in Dubai in 2002 by Pakistani deal maker Arif Naqvi, Abraaj managed nearly $14bn at its peak earlier this year and was a rising star of the Middle East investment world.

But the firm came under pressure in recent months as some investors in its funds alleged it misused some of their money and two lenders claimed hundreds of millions of dollars of debt were unpaid.

The court-supervised restructuring of Abraaj Holdings in the Cayman Islands “imposes a moratorium on the enforcement of all unsecured claims against the company, allowing time for a proposal to be put to creditors,” Abraaj said in a statement. The firm said its secured creditors support the move.

“This process marks the culmination of an extremely complex and challenging phase of negotiations,” Naqvi said in the statement. “I will continue to support this orderly process and help ensure the best possible outcomes for all the stakeholders.”

Naqvi wooed the likes of Bill Gates, the World Bank and US pension funds with a promise that his emerging-markets firm would invest in hospitals, schools and services in poor regions.

But Abraaj’s woes began this year when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other investors hired a forensic accountant to look into possible misuse of money they had put into a $1bn Abraaj health-care fund, according to people familiar with the audit.

The audit found that Abraaj didn’t spend all of the money on hospitals in countries including India and Nigeria as promised, two of these people said. Instead, the audit showed, Abraaj transferred some money out of the health-care fund, these people said. The audit didn’t show what the money was specifically used for, they said.

Abraaj has said money moved out of the fund, the Abraaj Growth Markets Health Fund, was used for its stated purpose or returned to investors. The firm also said that a separate audit it commissioned, carried out by KPMG, found that all the money in the health-care fund was handled “in line with the agreed upon procedures.”

Write to Simon Clark at simon.clark@wsj.com

This article was published by The Wall Street Journal