We recently published an interview with the CEO of Actis, Paul Fletcher, in www.emeafinance.com. Actis is the emerging market private equity fund which was created in 2004 when DFID, the department for international development, privatised CDC and sold its private equity arm to the then-managers of CDC, led by Fletcher.
I thought it was quite a balanced piece, but I just got a call from them saying they no longer consider our magazine friendly and will neither cooperate or advertise with us.
Some people are so touchy. All I did was quote a report published by the National Audit Office in December, which revealed that Actis had made around £130mn in fees and carry from 2004 to 2007, purely from its main investor, DFID.
And the managers of Actis only paid £363,000 to the government when the fund was privatised from DFID in 2004. That’s a percentage growth of 30,000% in three years. Not bad!
I would have celebrated that if I was Actis. What an eye for a bargain they possess. But no, they seem to want to hide this fact from the public. Why? Just modest I guess.
