The broad church of private equity

The closed-ended structure is well suited to private equity investment says Hamish Mair, manager of the F&C Private Equity Trust.

Private equity is a broad church, encompassing everything from ‘business angels’ injecting much-needed capital into local businesses, to the huge ‘buyout’ firms such as Apax Partners, Blackstone or KKR, which have been responsible for taking household-name companies into private ownership. For investment company investors, the choice of private equity vehicles broadly falls into two camps: venture capital trusts (which come with tax breaks but at the expense of many restrictions on what they can invest in, and which tend to focus on very small companies), and ‘listed private equity’, whi...