P Capital Partners is seeing increasing demand for non-bank lending in Northern Europe. As a consequence of the changing regulatory environment and many bank’s need to shrink their balance sheets, many midsized companies need funding to expand, make acquisitions and refinance maturing debt. The changing financial market is also complicating some necessary corporate restructurings. PCP is increasingly active addressing these types of needs.
BIOGAS
P Capital Partners recently signed the financing of Scandinavian Biogas, and will thereby become a long-term financial partner to the company. P Capital Partners has initially provided the company with a loan of SEK 125 million, which is to be used to finance the expansion of the company’s facilities in Sweden.
The new financing will give Scandinavian Biogas the tools to markedly increase production of biogas and strengthen the company’s leading position in the Swedish market
–We have had a good dialogue with P Capital Partners for a long time now and it is exciting to start working together to continue to develop Scandinavian Biogas. We feel confident that we have found a long-term financial partner that believes in our future opportunities for growth, says Göran Persson, Chairman in Scandinavian Biogas.
Scandinavian Biogas was founded in 2005 by Erik Danielsson together with scientists from the University of Linköping. Current owners include among others Ahlstrom Capital, Bengtssons Tidnings AB and Novator. The company’s business model is to build, own and operate biogas facilities and to sell the energy on the Nordic market. Today, Scandinavian Biogas is a leading operator within Swedish large scale biogas production. The company has world leading knowledge on how to model and operate retting facilities to optimize the production of biogas from different types of organic material.
Swedish politicians have stated that the transformation to renewable fuels is one of our society’s largest challenges. On commercial grounds, Scandinavian Biogas has the ambition to secure an increased supply of biogas and thereby contribute to the transformation from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
RECYCLED WASTE OIL REFINERY
P Capital Partners has continued to be active in the Northern Europe direct lending market outside of Scandinavia and recently signed a EUR 65 million loan facility agreement with a recycled waste oil refinery. The transaction is P Capital Partners largest to date and show our ability to provide larger loans and our increased focus on situations outside the Nordic region.
THOMAS COOK
Proventus has been following Thomas Cook closely since late 2011 as the company faced liquidity and financing problems in conjunction with the Arabic Spring revolutions. These events coincided with underperformance in France, North America, Russia and the UK. In spite of the operating issues in the company, there are large values in Thomas Cook’s Nordic operations (Ving, Spies and Tjäreborg), and also in the German tour operations Neckermann and the airline Condor.
The Nordic operation has a very strong market position and a flexible organization that generates stable profits and cash flows. The appointment of Harriet Green as new CEO is a positive step to align the group’s operations and cost bases and in particular changing the UK business model towards the online focused operations in the Nordics.
Based on Thomas Cooks’s inherent values, the financial stabilization plan and the prospects of significantly improving performance, P Capital Partners has invested into Thomas Cook’s bank loans with an ambition of being a long term and constructive partner to the company in its reformation and development.
October, 2012