Meketa bolsters London team

Meketa Investment Group has strengthened its European team with the appointment of two people to its London office, Secondaries Investor has learned.

The US pension advisory group has relocated Christy Gahr and Edmund Walsh, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Gahr is an assistant vice-president responsible for due diligence on European private equity funds, as well as funds in other asset classes. She joined the firm in April 2008 as an investment data analyst.

Walsh is a vice-president and an economic researcher for the firm. He joined in 2011 from State Street Associates.

A Meketa spokesperson confirmed the appointments but declined to comment further.

Meketa opened its London office in June of this year. The office is the firm’s first outside the US and is led by managing principal Stephen McCourt, who relocated from San Diego.

The firm is one of many from the US which have opened an office in London recently. The city’s attractiveness is driven by two trends: a flood of global capital and stronger banks stimulating the UK economy, and a resurgence of Silicon Valley technology firms, according to a recent report from financial data company Qodeo.

Meketa regularly purchases limited partner interests in funds for its clients through the secondaries market. The firm’s activity has historically been on the buy-side, although it also reviews its clients’ portfolios for potential sale candidates.

Meketa also opened an office in Portland, Oregon, in July. The office is led by principal Mika Malone and its first client was an Alaskan institutional investor.

“Typically those clients are the clients we look for secondaries funds for, because some of them aren’t large enough to make primary fund commitments or to put together a whole portfolio,” Malone has previously said.