It could be your local Pizza Express, the home caring for a cherished relative, your favourite supermarket, even the sports tournaments you love.
business
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It could be your local Pizza Express, the home caring for a cherished relative, your favourite supermarket, even the sports tournaments you love. They are all ventures owned not by their founders or a company quoted on a public stock exchange. They are in the hands of a new class of invisible investors who mortgage companies for self-enrichment, rather as homebuyers mortgage themselves to buy homes. But while homebuyers hope for a general rise in house prices to increase the value of their initial equity, the invisibles do everything in their power to make the mortgaged company look super-profitable – and then sell it on for a handsome return. This “mortgage the company and flip it” industry is called private equity and it has become the fastest growing, richest and most influential business in the UK, in turn the centre of European private equity. But last week, we learned, courtesy of the Financial Times, that the foundational privacy it so
