Very sad to see the demise of Silverjet last week. I thought it was going to go under several weeks earlier but then they (seemed to) pull a stunning deal out of the bag – an £8.4 million loan facility, a £4.3 million share subscription (at a premium to the then share price), and the promise of a further $75 million at some point down the line. Truly a phenomenal piece of dealmaking from the CEO!
Who on earth had they convinced to come up with the money? Viceroy Holdings LLC, “which is affiliated with Viceroy Fund, an international luxury development fund based in the USA and UAE”.
Sounds like the perfect sort of investor in an all-business class airline. So just who are they? A hunt around Google reveals little. Try ” viceroy-fund -silverjet” – you get a total of 15 results, most of which do not yield any useful information . The first link is to the fund’s web page www.theviceroyfund.com, a holding page, proclaiming that it has been investing in the US since 1997 and globally since 2005. If that’s the case, why is there no information, anywhere on the Internet, about its investments? They’re obviously not too publicity shy, as they consented to having their name put in an RNS announcement from Silverjet. Peculiar.
Instead, try “Viceroy-Holdings-llc -silverjet” in Google. This time, you get 4 results, none of which is useful.
For a fund that was supposedly willing to invest $75 million in a single investment (and an almighty punt of an investment at that), it is strangely missing from the global investment community. Most peculiar.
9 October, 2008 at 9:30 pm
[...] happened to the Viceroy Fund? A few months ago I asked the question, “Just who is the Viceroy Fund?” In all the carnage of recent times, the demise of Silverjet seems like a distant [...]