Serial procrastinators know the feeling. Find yourself on deadline, wrangle an extension, breathe a sigh of relief and — before you know it — you are up against it again.
This is the situation some private equity firms may soon face. Buyout funds generally seek to buy, revamp and then sell the companies they acquire within a few years. But with mergers and initial public offerings hard to pull off, the industry has had to get creative.
One answer has been “continuation vehicles”. These are new pockets of investment that private equity firms can use to hold on to assets that have been on the books for longer than planned, while giving investors in mature funds the chance to cash out.