Vision loses IR professional

Julia van Tuyll has left UK-based direct secondaries specialist Vision Capital, Secondaries Investor has learned.

Van Tuyll has joined British private equity firm Lion Capital as a vice president in the investor relations team, according to her LinkedIn profile. She had been with Vision for 13 years. PEI understands that van Tuyll will not be replaced.

She is the second investor relations professional to leave Vision in recent months. In May, the firm lost its head of investor relations Charles Robinson, who had been with Vision since 2011. Robinson joined Black River Asset Management, the alternative investment arm of Cargill, a global supplier of food, agricultural and industrial products and services. At the time, the firm told sister publication Private Equity International there were no immediate plans to replace Robinson.

Multiple LP sources suggested the departures of Robinson and Van Tuyll, in such quick succession, meant that Vision had no immediate fundraising prospects.

However, it is understood that in the near term, the firm still has plenty of capital available to make new investments, some of which sits outside the main fund in non-traditional structures. According to a source familiar with the firm, about €1 billion of the €2 billion it has invested since inception has been put to work in this manner.

The firm’s current fund, the 2009-vintage €680 million Vision Capital Partners VII, was raised just three years after its previous €353 million fund, and was almost twice as large, with 90 percent of its existing investors re-upping, the firm said at the time.

Vision declined to comment.

Secondaries Investor recently reported that Vision was working to sell a group of portfolio companies it acquired in 2007 or earlier. It’s unclear whether the companies will be sold via a large portfolio sale or a number of single asset sales, but this is the first time Vision has explored a portfolio exit.

Chelsea Stevenson contributed to this report