Whitehorse promotes five to partnership

Whitehorse Liquidity Partners has made several top-level promotions.

Marilia Bothamley, Julian Mirsky, Sebastien Siou, Joshua Booth and Derek Miners have been promoted to partner, according to a statement seen by Secondaries Investor. The Toronto-headquartered firm has also promoted Jamie Tucker and Nadeem Kheraj to senior principal with Xu Shi made a director.

“Each of our new partners has been instrumental to the growth of the firm, embodies the Whitehorse culture and is a leader within our multi-faceted organisation,” said managing partner Yann Robard, adding that he expects the team to grow to more than 100 in the coming weeks from 46 at the start of 2020.

“We have built our team alongside the substantial market opportunity we have created, more than doubling our team during the pandemic. Our goal is to ensure we continue to scale successfully by focusing on our culture, diversity and quality,” he said.

Bothamley, Booth, Miners and Siou all joined Whitehorse from Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, where Robard was head of secondaries before striking off on his own in 2015. Mirsky joined in 2017 from Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.

Investment professionals Mirsky and Siou have both made Secondaries Investor‘s list of the most promising people in secondaries under the age of 36, in 2019 and 2018, respectively.

In April, Whitehorse closed its fourth fund in the space of six years, hitting its $4 billion hard-cap. Limited partners include Maryland State Retirement and Pension System, Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System and Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System, each of which committed $200 million, according to Secondaries Investor data.

Whitehorse provides preferred equity to allow LPs to generate liquidity from their portfolios without having to sell; purchases portfolios outright, splits them into preferred- and common-equity tranches and syndicates the common equity; offers fund-level liquidity to GPs to invest in portfolio companies; and injects liquidity into GP management companies, Secondaries Investor reported in June 2020.

In April, Robard said he believed the secondaries market had the potential to grow to $1 trillion in annual volume by 2030: “If you can believe that private capital grows at 10 percent a year to 2030 and that 5 percent of private capital AUM trades in any one year, you get there.”