Altas welcomes Anthony Bowe as the newest member of its Advisory Board. Tony retired at the end of 2013 as Co-Head of Credit Suisse’s Private Fund Group, having been with PFG, and its predecessor at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, since 1998. Tony joins Yves de Balmann, John Francis, Andrew Hauptman and Andrew Dunn as advisors to the Firm.

Altas, together with its partners and senior management, has acquired NSC Minerals. Founded in 1988 and based in Saskatchewan, Canada, NSC Minerals is the leading provider of salt for road safety, industrial and agricultural applications, serving customers including municipal, provincial and state governments in Western Canada and the North Central United States. For more information on NSC please visit www.nscminerals.com.

St. George’s University in Grenada has landed a $750 million investment from a group led by Canadian private-equity firm Altas Partners LP and a fund advised by Baring Private Equity Asia, according to a person familiar with the deal.

The new investors will hold a majority stake in the for-profit college, though the original owners will collectively remain the largest single shareholder. The companies declined to share details of the new ownership structure.

The investment underscores the market opportunity for high-quality medical education overseas, as the number of open slots at U.S. schools is dwarfed by the number of applications those schools receive. Last year, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, just under 42% of the 48,010 applicants to U.S. medical schools enrolled.

The money will help St. George’s, which has programs in medicine and veterinary medicine, expand its global reach, said Chancellor Charles R. Modica. More than two-thirds of the 5,150 students in its four-year M.D. program are U.S. citizens, and almost all of them return to the U.S. for residency programs. Modica said he’s interested in growing the talent pipeline in places like Botswana, South Sudan and parts of Asia.

“We were at a point of recognizing that this could be so much more” than a training ground for U.S. doctors, Modica said. Building capacity for other international students who will then return to their home countries is “chapter two.”

Reuters reported last year that St. George’s was looking to sell itself for upwards of $1 billion, but Modica said the school was never aiming to sell itself outright. “This is my baby,” he said.

He said the funds will go toward scholarships, as well as marketing and outreach to attract future students.

It will also help grow St. George’s network of clinical rotation partners. The school pays about 70 affiliate hospitals to take students for third- and fourth-year clinical rotations, which help pave the way for residency placements. For example, it has a 10-year, $100 million deal for 600 slots at the New York City Health and Hospitals Corp., which runs 11 public hospitals.

St. George’s, founded in 1976, is perhaps best known for playing a part in the U.S.’s 1983 invasion of Grenada; shortly after a Marxist coup on the island nation troops evacuated nearly 1,000 Americans, many of whom were medical students at the university.

Many students who didn’t gain admission to mainland U.S. medical schools pursue degrees in the Caribbean instead, at schools like St. George’s, or Ross University School of Medicine in Dominica and American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine in St. Maartin, both owned by DeVry Inc. The programs tend to have higher price tags than their U.S.-based counterparts, and their outcomes vary widely.

The first-time pass rate for St. George’s students taking the first step of United States Medical Licensing Exam last year was 98%.

St. George’s, whose four-year medical degree has a price tag of $246,400, is eligible to receive federal financial aid dollars. Its medical and veterinary schools received upwards of $85 million in federal unsubsidized and Grad PLUS loans in the first quarter of calendar 2014.

Modica met Altas founder Andrew J. Sheiner about 18 months ago, and the deal formed from there, they said. Sheiner founded Altas in 2012 after working as a managing director at Canadian buyout firm Onex Corp. Its other main investment is NSC Minerals, a Saskatoon, Saskatchewan industrial salt provider.

Baring Private Equity Asia advises funds with upwards of $5 billion in committed capital.

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AUGUST 8, 2014 — MELISSA KORN, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The launch of peHUB Canada got me thinking – Canadian private equity has come a long way in a short time. A landmark year was 1983, when Gerry Schwartz founded Toronto’s Onex Corp. and acquired the Canadian subsidiary of American Can Co., then the largest leveraged buyout in domestic market history.

Onex went on to do bigger things, in part due to the leadership of Andrew Sheiner, who joined the firm in 1995. Eighteen years later, Sheiner retains a yen for innovation, leaving Onex in 2012 to found Altas Partners. I caught up with him recently and we spoke about the early days of private equity.

“I’m grateful for the opportunity to have worked at Onex,” he said. “Gerry and his team created a unique culture. From the beginning Onex pursued a strategy that was based on the principle that investments should be made using our own money and the firm’s capital. And Onex continued this practice as it evolved to managing third-party partnerships.” (Onex committed US$1.2 billion to the US$4.7 billion Onex Partners III LP, which closed in 2010.)

“Onex is one of the best private equity firms in the world today largely because of this principle,” he added.

In his nearly two decades in private equity, Sheiner has made note of some significant changes. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s, “private equity was an entrepreneurial business,” he said. “Now it’s an asset class. It’s a global industry, institutionalized by a large limited partner community and supported by a massive number of service providers.”

Additionally, private equity has become “homogenized,” in Sheiner’s words. He pointed to the in influence of the traditional limited partnership model, which drives market dynamics and which has not changed much over time. “Because all buyout firms operate through identical fund structures, and because they’re compensated in the same manner, virtually all of them do the same thing,” he said. “They acquire a company, improve it, and then sell it within three to five years.”

While Sheiner says he believes the traditional mode of private equity investing remains viable, he also thinks its locked-in behavior of buying and selling overlooks a great many opportunities. “There’s no magic in five years,” he said. “Great businesses are hard to buy. If you are fortunate enough to own one, and that business continues to perform strongly, you should be careful about selling it.”

This perspective may resonate with LPs. As the owners of private equity-backed assets, some limited partners are frustrated when quality companies are sold too early, in their estimation. Sheiner said LP frustration has increased in the post-2007 market environment and its heavy reliance on sponsor-to-sponsor deals.

“There’s a mismatch between many private equity firms and LPs,” he said. “Institutional investors need options for longer-term ownership and for ownership strategies that make more effective use of their capital.”

Sheiner said he has repeatedly heard this message from LPs and that is what convinced him of the need for a new type of buyout firm. “When innovating, sometimes you need a blank sheet of paper,” he said. The result was Altas Partners.

Altas collaborates with investors that share its orientation. The firm’s model features less imposing fees, less utilization of leverage in deals, and longer-lasting majority stakes in diverse North American companies that are “hard to replicate,” Sheiner said. All aspects of the Altas Partners’ culture – such as the structure of management, compensation and the selection of advisors – are designed to align with the firm’s novel approach to ownership, he notes.

Since its founding last year, Altas Partners has grown to a team of seven professionals, has secured its first backer and is looking to invest up to US$500 million in high-quality businesses, Sheiner said.

As might be expected, he is bullish about Canadian private equity. “The Canadian market has emerged strongly and consistent with the size and stability of the economy,” he said. “It’s a very attractive market, though it remains under-served.”

Sheiner is particularly proud of the market role played by ONCAP, established by Onex in 1999. He is also proud of the relationship he developed with Michael Lay (ONCAP’s managing partner, and formerly of Teachers’ Private Capital). He said the two worked closely to build ONCAP into “one of the pre-eminent mid- cap firms in North America.”

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KIRK FALCONER, PE HUB

TORONTO PRIVATE EQUITY FIRM HIRES PROVIDENCE VETERAN

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Toronto-based Altas Partners, a private equity firm trying out a new model with longer-term investments, has hired a veteran of top U.S. telecom buyout fund manager Providence Equity Partners.

Altas Partners, founded by long-time Onex Corp. executive Andrew Sheiner, this week brought in Scott Werry as a principal.

Providence is perhaps best known in Canada for partnering with Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan to very nearly acquire BCE Inc. in the world’s largest leveraged buyout, just as the financial crisis was beginning. (For a while, Onex was part of a rival consortium stalking BCE but backed out.) Mr. Werry had been with Providence since 2005, and looked in particular at investments in communications and business services. He was a director of Canada’s Q9 Networks, which was acquired last year by BCE, Ontario Teachers, Providence and Madison Dearborn Partners – basically the same group behind the BCE buyout plan.

Before that, he worked at an investment banking firm known as McColl Partners.

Altas is focused on investments of $75-million to $500-million, and says its model can provide returns that are similar to “traditional” private equity funds but with lower risk.

The idea is to own companies for longer than the regular period of roughly five years, with less debt, and emphasize multiples of invested capital as a yardstick.

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BOYD ERMAN, THE GLOBE AND MAIL