Alleato’s mysterious ally
What’s in a name? TPG Capital would certainly like to know.
TPG Capital has had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad two months in Australia. First regional chief executive Joel Thickins was arrested in Sydney after creating a five-car pile-up in his BMW and refusing a breath test. Then, The Australian Financial Review revealed one of its companies, Novotech, had paid $8 million to hush-up claims by wayward chief financial officer Rob Speedie that TPG had pressured him to inflate financial forecasts.
Now, it seems the very people TPG charges with putting out its fires are more preoccupied with setting fire to each other.
Behind every embarrassing incident at Australia's top companies is a handful of spinners trusted with cleaning up the mess. A big part of this job is preventing the most sordid details from slipping into news publications.
Until very recently, a lot of these people worked under one TPG-owned firm, Sodali, thanks to years of complicated (and occasionally fractious) mergers and acquisitions.
Sodali's ousted local CEO Christian Sealey recently announced, guns blazing in the AFR, that he's bootstrapped a new rival to Sodali with another Italian name, Alleato, to take on his old friends. In Italian, "sodali" is the plural of "comrade" or "fellow". "Alleato" means "ally". See what he's done there?
