Bloomberg – Hellman & Friedman LLC, a buyout firm with a specialty in financial services, may buy London-based Gartmore Investment Management Plc, which oversees $78 billion, two people withdirect knowledge of the situation said.
Hellman & Friedman, based in San Francisco, may pay as much as 500 million pounds ($944 million) for the U.K. fund manager, said one of the people, who declined to be identified because the transaction hasn’t been announced publicly. An agreement may be disclosed as early as tomorrow, the people said.
Gartmore, put up for sale last year by Columbus, Ohio-based Nationwide Mutual Life Insurance Co., would give Hellman & Friedman $6.3 billion of hedge-fund assets. Hedge funds, loosely regulated investment portfolios designed for wealthy people and institutions, charge higher fees and are attracting assets at a faster rate than mutual funds.
“The best prospects at Gartmore are with the hedge-fund business,” said Martin Cross, an analyst at Altium Securities Ltd. in London.
Patrick Healy, a Hellman & Friedman managing director in London, and Ed Dunn, a spokesman at Gartmore’s U.S. headquarters in West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, didn’t return calls seeking comment. Eric Hardgrove, a spokesman for Nationwide Mutual, wasn’t available for comment, his office said. Jennifer Mooney, a Morgan Stanley spokeswoman in New York, which is handling the sale for Nationwide Mutual, declined to comment.
Nationwide Mutual is keeping its U.S. fund unit, led by Paul Hondros, a former senior executive at Boston-based Fidelity Investments. The company agreed in 2000 to buy Gartmore from Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc for about 1 billion pounds.
