Reuters- KKR & Co., the prominent U.S. buyout firm that pioneered the leveraged buyout industry, filed with regulators on Tuesday to raise up to $1.25 billion (620 million pounds) in an initialpublic offering.
The planned IPO follows last month’s high-profile listing of rival Blackstone Group LP (BX.N: Quote, Profile, Research), which raised $4.13 billion and ushered in a new era for an industry that has come to dominate financial markets worldwide by pursuing ever-larger takeovers and raising record amounts of capital.
Unlike the Blackstone IPO, however, KKR’s owners are not selling any common units or receiving any net proceeds.
Blackstone’s co-founders, Stephen Schwarzman, 60, and Peter Peterson, 81, earned a huge windfall from the Blackstone offering, pocketing more than $2.4 billion between them.
The relatively modest size of the offering and the timing of the announcement — late on the eve of the U.S. Independence Day holiday — suggested that KKR hopes that its IPO will be a lower key affair than Blackstone’s, which attracted unwelcome attention from Congress.
