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Deux fonds d’investissement bataillaient dans la dernière ligne droite du processus de cession, mais leurs offres ont été jugées insuffisantes.

Lumibird et son dirigeant Marc Le Flohic vont devoir changer leur fusil d’épaule. Comme nous l’avions révélé en novembre dernier, le spécialiste des technologies laser espérait céder son pôle dédié aux lasers médicaux. Un processus de vente, confié à JPMorgan, a abouti à un duel final entre deux fonds : EQT et Carlyle. Mais selon nos informations, ni le scandinave ni son homologue américain n’a présenté une offre suffisamment séduisante aux yeux du patron, toujours détenteur de 51 % du capital. L’un comme l’autre auraient proposé moins de 300 millions d’euros.

Initialement, ce champion européen de près d’un millier de salariés espérait obtenir de ce pôle spécialisé dans les équipements de diagnostic et de traitement pour l’ophtalmologie un prix proche de 350 millions d’euros. En 2023, le périmètre en question avait totalisé 102,8 millions d’euros de chiffre d’affaires pour 18,6 millions d’Ebitda (en croissance de plus de 8 % par rapport à 2022). Il restera donc, au moins à court terme, au sein de Lumibird, qui dispose aussi d’une division baptisée Lumibird Photonics, dont les lasers sont utilisés dans l’industrie, la défense et le spatial ou bien encore au sein du monde scientifique. Ce segment-là a pour sa part représenté 100,8 millions d’euros de chiffre d’affaires en 2023, pour un Ebitda de 15,9 millions.

Comme nous le précisions en novembre, la cession de l’activité médicale devait servir à racheter les parts des actionnaires minoritaires et, in fine, retirer Lumibird de la Bourse. « À ce stade, les fonds ont fait preuve d’un engouement mesuré. Lumibird évalue d’autres options pour parvenir à ses fins », estime un proche du dossier.

Contactée, la société précise seulement que le communiqué confirmant le « projet exploratoire de vente » du pôle « demeure toujours d’actualité ». JPMorgan n’a pas souhaité commenter.

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Europol chief says Big Tech has ‘responsibility’ to unlock encrypted messages

Catherine De Bolle warns companies risk threatening democracy unless they co-operate with lawmakers

Technology giants must do more to co-operate with law enforcement on encryption or they risk threatening European democracy, according to the head of Europol, as the agency gears up to renew pressure on companies at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week.

Catherine De Bolle told the Financial Times she will meet Big Tech groups in the Swiss mountain resort to discuss the matter, claiming that companies had a “social responsibility” to give the police access to encrypted messages that are used by criminals to remain anonymous.

“Anonymity is not a fundamental right,” said the EU law enforcement agency’s executive director. “When we have a search warrant and we are in front of a house and the door is locked, and you know that the criminal is inside of the house, the population will not accept that you cannot enter.”

In a digital environment, the police need to be able to decode these messages to fight crime, she added. “You will not be able to enforce democracy [without it].”

There has long been a tension between tech companies and law enforcement over the use of end-to-end encryption on messaging platforms, which makes it difficult for police to obtain evidence in investigations.

In April last year, European police chiefs called on governments and industry to take urgent action to prevent encryption from undermining crime investigations.

Tech companies, including Apple, Meta’s WhatsApp and privacy-focused messaging app Signal, have consistently fought off legal efforts to compromise their encryption, arguing that it would threaten their users’ privacy and security. Apple has stepped up its efforts in recent years to co-operate with law enforcement to tackle child abuse online and other crimes. But such moves have largely been abandoned due to a fierce backlash from privacy campaigners. 

Some EU member states, including Germany, have also been sceptical of giving law enforcement greater access to private messages, resulting in legislation to fight child sexual abuse remaining stuck.

De Bolle, 54, a Belgian who took up the helm of Europol in 2018 and is entering her last full year in post, also said she would like to expand the use of artificial intelligence in the agency’s investigations and to look at “hybrid threats”, such as the recent allegations against Russia of cutting undersea cables in the Baltic.

At present, Europol can only look at criminal organisations and must bow out if there are criminal activities at a state level, De Bolle said, adding that a change would require new EU legislation.

Europol, which uses its giant trove of data to help states combat serious and organised crime in areas such as terrorism, drug trafficking and fraud, has doubled in size to about 1,700 staff under De Bolle.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said last year that she wanted to further increase Europol’s staff and strengthen its mandate to “become a truly operational police agency”.

Outside its work for EU member states, a number of countries, including the UK and the US, have desks within the agency. 

De Bolle said she did not anticipate much change to the US set-up after Donald Trump takes up the presidency this month, based on his previous term in office. The US has about 30 officials sitting in-house at Europol from a number of different agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 

She said she had yet to meet the incoming Trump administration. 

Europol demonstrated its value last year with the disruption of the prolific LockBit ransomware group, which involved the FBI and the US justice department.

The agency has also played a big role in combating drug trafficking in Europe, including helping decode the messaging services EncroChat and Sky ECC, which were used by criminals. Access to their messages has led to a multitude of criminal cases and thousands of arrests. 

Last year, more than 100 people were sentenced in Belgium’s largest ever criminal trial, based on evidence from the Sky ECC decryption. De Bolle said more cases stemming from the decryption of the messaging services were to come.

Europol will publish its four-yearly assessment of serious and organised crime facing the EU in March, which would include information on foreign interference, De Bolle said.

Case relating to collapsed developer sheds light on the often-opaque dealings between property firms and affluent overseas clients

A British court has given property group JLL permission to keep managing 33 luxury London apartments owned by the ex-wife of China Evergrande’s co-founder, after her assets were frozen in the wake of the Chinese developer’s collapse. 

The US-listed group runs letting and management services for the flats near the river Thames on behalf of Ding Yumei, the former wife of property tycoon Hui Ka Yan, once China’s richest man but now being held on suspicion of involvement in “illegal crimes”. Ding herself lives in one of the luxury apartments, court filings say. 

Judges in London and Hong Kong last year granted injunctions that froze Ding’s assets worldwide, after liquidators were appointed to recoup funds for Evergrande investors. JLL told a London court it was no longer willing to manage the properties unless it was made clear that it had permission to, filings show, a case it has now won. 

The lawsuit provides a rare window into the normally discreet dealings between property groups such as JLL and wealthy overseas clients looking to stash their funds in centres like London. JLL employs more than 100,000 people worldwide in businesses ranging from facilities management to advising on multibillion-dollar commercial real estate deals. 

Court filings by Evergrande’s liquidators say Ding is “amongst the principal beneficiaries” of “what is understood to be the largest financial fraud to have emerged from mainland China”.

JLL and Ding declined to comment.

The liquidators, Alvarez & Marsal restructuring specialists Eddie Middleton and Tiffany Wong, were appointed a year ago when a Hong Kong judge ordered the winding-up of Evergrande’s holding company, listed in the territory. 

They are racing to lay claim to and sell off assets around the world that may enable them to hand money back to creditors. The company had more than $20bn of offshore debt in issue when it defaulted in 2021. 

Ding owns the apartments, on Carnation Way in Nine Elms, south of the river Thames, through five companies registered in the British Virgin Islands, according to court filings. JLL provides letting and property management services such as marketing the flats, setting up lease agreements and receiving rent, the filings say. 

The Financial Times has identified seven of the properties, which cost £15.6mn.

A court order issued last month says JLL can handle payments in relation to “meeting the costs of insurance and repairs, replacement and/or repair of fixtures and fittings only where necessary and on a ‘like-for-like’ basis, the payment of ground rent and service charges, and payments for utilities”, among other things. 

Ding had opposed the court making that order, saying it was unnecessary and prejudiced her position in Hong Kong court proceedings. Evergrande’s liquidators backed JLL’s case, saying: “All parties to the proceedings agree that JLL should continue to provide its services . . . to preserve the value of those properties and ensure that they can continue to generate revenue.” 

Over the past two decades, fees have amounted to more than 50% of gross gains, LCH research finds

Hedge-fund investors often gripe about high fees. A new report puts the problem in sharp relief.

Just over half of the industry’s total gross performance was eaten away by fees over the past two decades, according to LCH Investments. That compares to about 30% between 1969 and the early 2000s, said the company, which manages and advises on investments in hedge funds on behalf of investment firm Edmond de Rothschild and other investors.

“This increase in the proportion of gross gains being paid away in fees is clearly not to the advantage of investors,” said Rick Sopher, chairman of LCH.

Viewed another way, hedge funds have earned $3.72 trillion since the late 1960s—and kept nearly $1.8 trillion of that in fees.

The worsening ratio of fees to gains reflects how hedge-fund returns have moderated in recent years, while fees, especially fixed management charges, have crept higher. Many firms take a management fee of 2% of assets, plus a performance fee equating to 20% of fund profits. Some outfits, including behemoth “multimanager” firms such as Citadel, charge much more.

LCH released the findings alongside its annual “Great Money Managers” ranking of hedge funds, based on the lifetime gains they have generated, in dollars, for clients. Some key findings:

Industry fees have long been contentious. In an open letter last year, dozens of large investors in hedge funds demanded changes to how managers are paid.

On fees, LCH found:

Hedge funds have lost some of their luster in recent years, with institutions preferring to pour money in Wall Street’s newer crazes for dependable returns like private credit, but the most successful firms in the old guard are still delivering steady gains for their limited partner investors.

The world’s top 20 hedge funds, ranked in order of estimated net gains since inception according to LCH Investments, cumulatively produced a record $93.7 billion in gains in 2024. Citadel, D.E. Shaw and Millennium Management remained the top three since inception and were also the top three performers in 2024 in particular, separating themselves further from the rest of the industry. While Ken Griffin’s Citadel remains comfortably in first place with $83 billion in gains since it was founded in 1990, D.E. Shaw, founded by billionaire David Shaw and now run by a seven-person executive committee, netted an estimated $11.1 billion in 2024 to edge out its rivals for the single year.

D.E. Shaw’s flagship Composite fund generated a reported 18% net return in 2024, and its Oculus fund focused on macro trading returned 36%. Citadel’s flagship Wellington fund and billionaire Israel Englander’s Millennium each returned 15%. LCH Investments notes that the top 20 managers collectively generated asset-weighted returns of 13.1% last year, trouncing the average hedge fund reflected the HFRI Asset Weighted Composite Index, which returned a meager 8.3%.

“In most cases these managers have been generating above average performance over several decades, reflecting the persistence of their superior returns,” Rick Sopher, chairman of LCH Investments and CEO of Edmond de Rothschild Capital Holdings, said in a press release.

Run-of-the-mill investors in stock index funds may roll their eyes at even the higher end of those figures after the S&P 500 gained 23%, following a 24% increase in 2023 that also beat most hedge funds. But the most successful hedge funds are built to provide safety even in market downturns. Citadel, D.E. Shaw and Millennium are multistrategy firms with thousands of employees divided into trading teams focused on several strategies like quant trading or macro and commodities themes. Their secrets are closely guarded, but they’ve managed remarkable consistency. All three posted positive double-digit returns in 2022, when the S&P 500 declined 19%, and Citadel’s annualized return since 1990 is approximately 19.5%, beating the S&P 500 by more than eight percentage points a year on average.

Citadel claimed the No. 1 position on LCH Investments’ annual list in 2023 from Bridgewater, Ray Dalio’s firm which has since slumped to fourth. Here is the full list of the top 20 hedge funds.

LCH Investments is a subsidiary of the Edmond de Rothschild Group and the investment advisor of Leveraged Capital Holdings, the world’s oldest fund of hedge funds which has returned 9.8% annually since 1969. LCH has released this list each year since 2010 based on meetings with founders and other confidential sources, choosing to recognize raw cash gains rather than annualized return metrics that are often skewed by higher returns when funds were smaller.

All 19 active firms in the top 20 generated at least $1.2 billion in gains in 2024—George Soros remains eighth overall after generating $43.8 billion for investors over four decades, but closed his hedge fund in 2011 and is no longer tracked year after year. Stock-picking hedge funds like Christopher Hohn’s London-based Children’s Investment Fund and Steve Mandel’s Lone Pine Capital had good years. Hohn’s portfolio of large concentrated stakes in stocks like General Electric, Moody’s, Microsoft and Visa produced another $8.2 billion in gains in 2024 after earning $13 billion in 2023. That performance moved him up another spot to sixth on the list with $49.5 billion in gains since inception, and he’s done it in much less time than most of his peers since launching his fund in 2004.

Another British hedge fund, Marshall Wace, is new to the list, slotting in at 16th with $29.5 billion in gains since inception and $4.5 billion in 2024. Led by Paul Marshall and Ian Wace, the firm manages $69 billion in assets and is 40% owned by American private equity giant KKR, which partnered with them in 2015.

For the first time, LCH Investments also published some aggregate data on fees, revealing that as a whole hedge fund managers keep almost as much for themselves as they produce for their investors. The firm estimates that all hedge funds have recorded $3.7 trillion in gross gains since 1969 but $1.9 trillion in net gains—48% of the gross gains were wiped out by steep management and performance fees. The top 20 funds are responsible for $854 billion in net gains, or 44% of the industry-wide total.

Sopher says early investors like LCH around 1969 typically paid a 1% management fee and a 20% performance fee, but fixed management fees began to increase to 2% or more in the 2000s. In fact, since 2000s, fees account for a slight majority of gross gains, in part because many hedge funds suffered significant losses around the 2008 crisis to wipe out gains but could keep prior years’ performance fees in their pockets.

The most successful hedge funds have of course given investors more bang for their buck, despite charging higher than average fees in most cases. LCH Investments estimates managers in the top 20 have kept 34% of gross gains since inception as fee earnings, amounting to around $450 billion in fees. It’s no wonder then that the hedge fund founders on the list have stacked up some $185 billion in personal fortunes, according to Forbes estimates, led by Griffin at $43 billion as of last September.