Doughty Hanson & Co

Doughty Hanson & Co is a British private equity fund manager focused on leveraged buyout and recapitalization transactions primarily of upper middle-market companies in Europe. The firm also invests opportunistically in European real estate and provides early stage venture capital to technology companies.

Doughty Hanson is headquartered in London and has offices in Frankfurt, Madrid, Milan, Munich, Paris and Stockholm.

The firm which was founded in 1985 by Nigel Doughty and Richard Hanson is one of the oldest European buyout private equity firms. Since its inception, the firm has invested over €23 billion across more than 100 investments.

On 4 February 2012, Doughty was found dead in the gymnasium of his Lincolnshire home. On Monday August 10, they announced they were shutting down most of their European offices after abandoning their next round of funding the closed offices include Paris, Frankfurt, Madrid and Stockholm.

History

Doughty Hanson traces its history back to 1985 when Nigel Doughty and Richard (Dick) Hanson started working together on European buyout investments within Standard Chartered Bank as founding members of its management buyout unit. In 1990 they established CWB Partners, a private equity joint venture between Standard Chartered and Westdeutsche Landesbank.