The biggest losses in institutional finance are entirely lawful. A forensic pension investigator on fee layers, missing documents and the advisers paid to not look hard.
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- Archives: Investment
June 29, 2023
In “Beware of deal-killers: Six common due-diligence pitfalls”, published on Canadian Family Offices, Tobias Jaeger of Falcone International names the six places family offices most often lose money: the management team, co-investors, regulatory change, third-party vendors, the deal structure itself, and cultural and language gaps. Each one is straightforward to check and routinely skipped, usually because the deal is already moving.
June 15, 2023
ESG has moved from a reporting exercise to a due diligence question: investors, lenders, and acquirers now price environmental, social, and governance failures much as they price financial ones. That shifts the burden onto verification — whether the claims in the report survive being checked. This piece covers what ESG risk looks like in practice, and where the gap between stated policy and actual conduct tends to open.
May 23, 2023
Pre-investment due diligence is the cheapest part of any deal and the first thing compressed when a timeline tightens. As structures grow more complex, experienced investors still miss the detail that undoes the transaction — usually because nobody was given the time to look. This piece covers what proper pre-investment diligence includes, and what it costs to find out afterward instead.
March 9, 2023
An investment firm had capital on the table and a concern about where it had come from. Declining is expensive and visible; accepting the wrong money is expensive, invisible, and permanent. How three independent lines of inquiry converged on the same answer while the firm still had the choice.