People

CPP Investments promotes Next Gen Leader to MD

The Canadian pension giant has spent two years rebuilding its senior secondaries team with internal promotions and hires from GIC and Partners Group.

-

CPP Investments has made a handful of senior promotions in its secondaries team as part of a multi-year rebuilding process.

Tom Kapsimalis has been promoted from principal to managing director and made head of the Toronto-based secondaries team, Secondaries Investor has learned. The promotion is effective as of this month.

London-based Carlin Shen and Kyle Hughes, based in Toronto, have been promoted to principal.

Kapsimalis joined the pension in 2012 after nearly four years in the leveraged finance team of investment bank TD Securities, according to his LinkedIn profile. He ranked 15th in the 2020 Next Gen Leaders ranking, having worked on more than C$4 billion ($3.1 billion; €3 billion) of LP-led, GP-led and preferred equity deals in his time at CPP.

He becomes the fourth member of a senior leadership team that has come together in the past two years after a number of high-profile departures.
In September 2020, the pension made Dushy Sivanithy head of secondaries, moving him across from the private funds team, Secondaries Investor reported. His promotion followed the departure of Michael Woolhouse to lead the build-out of a secondaries team at TPG the previous July.

Jeremy Weisberg joined Sivanithy in spring 2021 as head of CPP’s New York secondaries team. Weisberg previously spent five-and-a-half years with GIC and nearly four with Pantheon.

CPP’s European secondaries head Nik Morandi departed to become a managing director in Blackstone’s new GP-led investing unit, Secondaries Investor reported in November 2020. He was replaced in March this year by Evelyn Zhang, who came to CPP after a 10-year stint with Partners Group.

The pension’s secondaries team consists of 20 investment professionals across offices in Toronto, London and New York.

In March, Secondaries Investor reported that CPP was to invest around $1 billion in single-asset secondaries deals. The team had been unable to do them until late last year as concentrated investments came under the auspices of its direct co-investment team.

“Excluding a growing part of the market that accounts for a substantial part of GP-leds doesn’t really make sense,” said Sivanithy.