Credit and Special Situations
Providing creative capital solutions across non-traditional corporate lending, specialty finance and special situations
For over 20 years, Siguler Guff has met the complex capital needs of management teams, sponsors, advisors and other investment managers throughout the private credit ecosystem. The Credit and Special Situations platform offers several differentiated investment strategies to our clients, and has a long history of delivering consistent, less correlated risk-adjusted returns across market cycles. Through a disciplined but dynamic approach, we target absolute return opportunities through investments across specialty finance, corporate lending, dislocated market trades, and other special situation opportunities.
For more information on our investment strategy, please download our brochure at the below link.
Investment Criteria
Corporate Lending and Capital Solutions
- Secured and junior loans
- Mezzanine
- Preferred and common equity
Specialty Finance
- Structured finance
- Real asset lending, including real estate
- Regulatory capital relief
- Litigation finance
- Trade & receivables finance
- Royalty finance
Dislocated Opportunities
- Secondary purchases of corporate credit, structured credit, and LP interests
- Direct corporate loans and investments
- Buyouts, growth-related capital, refinancings and recapitalizations
- Bridge / rescue financings
- Specialty financing
- Opportunistic secondary purchases
- Primarily focused on companies with $10-$50 million of EBITDA
- Private equity sponsors, independent sponsors, and privately held or public businesses
- Negotiated, highly structured financings for complex situations
- Niche assets with low correlation to broader capital markets
- Misunderstood & mispriced publicly and privately traded securities
- Capability of investments of over $100 million
- Downside protection through structure, asset coverage and cash flow
- Fundamentally sound businesses
- Demonstrable upside through improved operations, business growth, or market recovery
- Experienced, aligned management teams and investment partners
Team
Jeb Banks
Managing Director
Fernando Arakaki
Managing Director
Tami Cai
Vice President - Tax
Jenna Beekman
Senior Compliance Associate
Mário Carolo
Investment Analyst
Christopher Barbier
Managing Director
Sara Bowdoin
Managing Director
Michael Apfel
Partner and Head of Credit and Special Situations
Investments
For further information regarding investments and transactions shown, please see additional disclosures
Investments
For further information regarding investments and transactions shown, please see additional disclosures
Strategy: Corporate Lending
Siguler Guff provided first lien secured loan and preferred equity for the acquisition of a market leading diagnostic imaging services provider in the southern United States that specializes in providing treatment to underinsured and uninsured patients for damages due to an accident.
Strategy: Corporate Lending
Siguler Guff provided a first lien secured loan as part of a recapitalization that permitted management and the founding family to buy out a minority interest held by a third party investment fund. The borrower is a full-service landscape construction company in Southeastern United States offering services in landscape, hardscape and aquatics to universities, hospitals, hotels and other commercial clients.
Strategy: Specialty Finance
Siguler Guff has structured and executed numerous credit risk transfer transactions with large European financial institutions in order to provide regulatory capital relief. A typical transaction involves taking the first loss exposure on a large and highly diversified pool of high quality corporate loans and revolvers to investment grade rated borrowers.
Strategy: Specialty Finance
Siguler Guff provided financing to law firms representing certain personal injury and hospital claimants in a multidistrict litigation targeting manufacturers of opioid drugs as well as the Purdue Pharmaceuticals bankruptcy case. The use of proceeds for the financing was for marketing expenditure to generate new clients for the borrowers, and to build the case through hiring expert witnesses and paying other related litigation expenses.
Strategy: Dislocated Markets
Siguler Guff purchased, at a discount to par value, the secured first lien term loans of a leading provider of end-to-end digital imaging solutions for the printing, packaging and imaging businesses.
Strategy: Special Situations
Siguler Guff invested in the pre-petition unsecured bonds, which subsequently restructured into reorganized equity, of Frontier Communications, a telecommunications provider of internet, phone and television service to residential and business customers in markets ranging from large metro to rural communities.
Strategy: Special Situations
Siguler Guff invested in the equity of a private, leading North American hard surface flooring manufacturer that serves the residential and commercial markets. AHF produces solid wood flooring, engineered wood flooring, luxury vinyl tile, stone polymer core, and commercial flooring.
Strategy: Specialty Finance
Siguler Guff provided a capital solution to numerous retail and consumer service companies by purchasing claims against a settlement fund established in connection with a class action filed against Visa and MasterCard for an alleged violation of antitrust laws for imposing on retail vendors “interchange” or processing fees for credit card transactions.
Strategy: Specialty Finance
Siguler Guff joined a consortium that purchased, and assumed the future financing obligation of, an unsecured revolving credit consumer receivables portfolio for an e-commerce retailer serving consumers seeking to establish, build or rebuild credit.
Strategy: Specialty Finance
Siguler Guff partnered with a leading CLO structuring team to develop and implement a warehouse financing facility that permits credit managers the ability to accumulate loans to seed a CLO portfolio prior to issuance while maintaining strong alignment with the CLO manager.
Investments
For further information regarding investments and transactions shown, please see additional disclosures
Strategy: Corporate Lending
Siguler Guff provided first lien secured loan and preferred equity primarily for tuck-in acquisition financing for a full-service heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration (HVACR) solutions provider servicing commercial and industrial customers including grocers, big box retailers, and other refrigerated food providers across North America.
Strategy: Specialty Finance
Siguler Guff acquired two 1994 vintage Boeing 757-200 passenger aircraft, secured conversion slots with an international leader in aircraft modification, and leased them forward for six years to a private-equity backed cargo operator based in Fort Lauderdale, FL with a large market share in the Caribbean and Latin American markets.
Strategy: Dislocated Markets
Siguler Guff purchased, at a discount to par value, the secured term loans of a leading provider of software and solutions for contact center and workforce optimization. The company’s solutions improve the efficiency of receiving and processing inbound customer service voice and chat inquiries and minimize cost through designing appropriate staffing protocols.
Strategy: Specialty Finance
Siguler Guff provided a secured financing for a digital media software and hardware company with a large, long-term contract to deploy a network of digital displays for a major US public transportation system.
Strategy: Corporate Lending
SG partnered to extend a senior secured term loan to a media company that manages a diverse portfolio of assets including a leading music, entertainment sports and lifestyle channel, a cable channel that features theatrically released films and documentaries, a worldwide film distributor, a combat sports specialty network, one of the world’s largest wrestling entertainment properties, and others.
Strategy: Specialty Finance
Siguler Guff participated in a contingent fee financing to a plaintiff-side law firm that is prosecuting a mass tort multi-district litigation against Johnson & Johnson for producing talc-based baby powder that is alleged to cause ovarian cancer, mesothelioma, and other forms of cancer.