The majority of Angelo Gordon & Co’s investors are US pension funds (both public and private), corporates and high-net-worth individuals.
But the firm is expanding its international investor base – part of the reason it appointed Victoria Aston-Duff, previously Bear Stearns’ European co-head of equity, derivative and prime brokerage sales, as its head of Europe in 2008.
Around 10% of the equity it raises comes from overseas and this is growing, but she says the mood among European investors has lagged behind the more buoyant mood in the US, Asia and the Middle East.
“Europe was probably the quieter of all the regions in the world last year,” she says.
Founders John Angelo and Michael Gordon remain at the helm of the firm, and on Wall Street its credit and real estate teams sit cheek by jowl.
“The New York office is very crowded, but no one wants to move because we all share information,” says Aston-Duff.
“That is a huge advantage to having two strong areas of expertise – real estate and credit – and never has it been more clear than in the past few years. We have really benefited from the shared knowledge of those two areas of strategies.”
Last December, the business suffered a major blow when its highly regarded global head of real estate, Keith Barket, died of stomach cancer at the age of 49.
Barket’s team had emerged from the downturn in good shape to become an active buyer of distressed assets, investing more than $1bn of equity in 50 deals in an 18-month period. These included the high-profile purchase of the Helmsley Carlton House hotel and apartment building in Manhattan.
The loss means a bigger role for another of the firm’s key real estate figures, Adam Schwartz.
Anuj Mittal, who first joined Angelo Gordon in 2004 from Morgan Stanley Real Estate Funds, has worked closely with Schwartz in the US and on hotel projects around the world. Mittal, who is of Indian decent and married to a Dutch wife, left the firm in 2006 to move to Amsterdam. He worked for private equity firm Cerberus before leaving to set up an operating company.
But Angelo Gordon beckoned again in 2008, when Mittal rejoined the firm to launch a business in India. The timing – shortly after Lehman Brothers’ collapse and just before the terrorist attack in Mumbai – proved to be ill-fated, however. “We thought, ‘why are we trying to do this when we could be investing in London’. There was a gaping hole in Europe and I came back,” he says.
