Private Equity and Public Assistance

schwarzmanEverything seems to be coming up roses for the barons of private equity. A front-page article in the Wall Street Journal headlined BLOWOUT HAUL FOR BUYOUT TYCOONS proclaims: “Private equity’s top moguls took home more than $2.6 billion last year as booming markets allowed their firms to cash out of investments and notch blockbuster gains.”

Leon Black, the founder and chief executive of Apollo Global Management, led the pack with $546 million in compensation. Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone received $465 million and William Conway of the Carlyle Group $346 million. These three men are also well-placed on the new Forbes list of the world’s billionaires. Schwarzman comes in at No.122 with a net worth of $10 billion; Black at No. 240 and a net worth of $5.8 billion; and Conway No. 520 with $3.1 billion in net worth.

Vibrant stock markets are not the only reason for these massive paydays and accumulated fortunes. It’s well known that these firms and their principals also make out like bandits because of the favorable federal tax treatment of the revenue they extract from their portfolio companies. Now it is possible to demonstrate the extent to which the buyout kings are also being subsidized by state and local governments.

My colleagues and I at Good Jobs First recently unveiled a major enhancement of our Subsidy Tracker database. The main refinement in version 2.0 is the addition of parent-subsidiary linkages for more than 25,000 individuals entries accounting for 75 percent of the dollar value of the entire Tracker universe. These entries have been linked to nearly 1,000 parent companies, including many of the world’s largest corporations.

Included among the parent companies are the big private equity firms. In our matching process, we made sure to check which of the portfolio companies of those buyout firms were among the subsidy recipients included in Tracker. We found a lot.

Of the 50 largest buyout firms on the Private Equity International ranking of the largest players in that field,  30 were found to have subsidized portfolio companies. (Many of the other 20 either don’t reveal their portfolios or don’t do business in the United States.) Those companies had received a total of 1,332 subsidies worth $1.8 billion (dollar values are not available for some awards).

Here are the buyout firms whose portfolio companies have received the most in cumulative subsidies:

  • Silver Lake Partners is No. 35 on our list of top parent companies, with total associated subsidies of $482 million. This is mainly a reflection of the fact that Silver Lake took over the computer company Dell, which has received giant subsidies in places such as North Carolina and Tennessee.  (We attribute past subsidies to a company’s current parent, since awards often stretch over many years and usually transfer with a change of ownership.)
  • Onex is No. 45 on the list with subsidies of $388 million, the largest amounts coming from the large packages Spirit AeroSystems received in North Carolina and Kansas.
  • Blackstone is No. 91, with 141 subsidy awards totaling $203 million awarded to several dozen of its portfolio companies.
  • Apollo Global Management comes in at No. 111, with 107 subsidies amounting to $158 million. Among its most heavily subsidized portfolio companies are Berry Plastics and Verso Paper.

Other major buyout firms are also on the list, including TPG Capital ($68.6 million), KKR ($54.9 million), Bain Capital ($51.6 million) and the Carlyle Group ($36.6 million).

By themselves, state and local subsidies are usually not the predominant factor in the profitability of a portfolio company, but they certainly can contribute to a fatter bottom line. In a recent article about Subsidy Tracker, the investor website Motley Fool wrote:

Companies which are clearly adept at seeking out incentives are much more likely to be able to keep more of their hard-earned income as these subsidies often take the form of a multi-year tax break. Lower effective taxes within a state can allow for more research and development as well as hiring, which can lead to even faster growth for these companies. In other words, seeking out companies with large subsidies is another way of giving yourself an edge over the uninformed investor. Keep in mind that a large subsidy alone is no guarantee of a companies’ success, but it often translates into lower taxes and higher profits.

And when that company is in the portfolio of a buyout firm, those higher profits means that the operation can more easily be taken public and further enrich the likes of Black, Schwarzman and Conway.

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