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| Luis Sanchez and fellow Lehman alum Santosh Raikar are launching a new private equity fund |
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By Lisa Lee, The Deal Former Lehman Brothers Inc. banker Luis Sanchez is wasting no time getting back to work. Along with fellow Lehman alum Santosh Raikar, Sanchez, 43, is working to launch a private equity fund to invest in oil and natural gas reserves in North America. "Lots of people are waiting to see what's going to happen," says Sanchez about his downsized colleagues. "They are waiting for January." But not these two, who say they already have three potential deals in the pipeline even before closing their fund, Quadrangle Energy Capital Partners LP, which aims to raise $500 million before March. For one deal, they submitted a joint bid with another private equity group that will provide the capital while they arrange for the debt financing and hedging. They intend to focus on energy deals with $30 million to $100 million in enterprise value, with a particular eye for distressed assets. Raikar, 34, was a Lehman vice president who started its commodities
principal finance business. Sanchez, who was born and raised in
Venezuela, was a senior vice president with its emerging markets group,
where he structured alternative investments and worked with M&A,
assisting with finding energy targets. According to Sanchez, Raikar left Lehman Brothers a month before its September bankruptcy, taking a buyout offer when cuts were being made "left and right." Sanchez stayed put, going through the bankruptcy and subsequent purchase by Barclays Capital, but then found himself out of a job. "The dominant culture after the dust settled was Barclays," says Sanchez of the combined emerging-markets group. "The crash took with it very good ideas and many good groups," says
Sanchez, who before Lehman worked at American International Group Inc.
and Deutsche Bank AG. The two will target the smaller oil and gas
deals, a niche market that interested Lehman but Barclays less so. |