Deals

Deals (w/e 8/1/26)

Blackstone, Brookfield and KKR sign a $16bn lease on Kuwait's oil pipelines. The consortium takes 49% of a joint venture leasing the usage rights to all 13 of Kuwait Oil Company's pipelines for 20.5 years, in exchange for a volume-based tariff. Kuwait keeps 51%, operational control, and $7.85bn upfront. It is the largest foreign direct investment in the country's history, signed while Iran is launching near-daily strikes on Kuwaiti oil infrastructure. Own the toll, not the target. BLACKSTONE

Goldman Sachs Alternatives buys control of Numantec. Italian medtech, infusion devices, 600 staff, seven plants, valued at around €700m. Bought from White Bridge, which built it through a string of bolt-ons since 2021. Steady revenue in a nervous quarter is exactly what everyone is chasing. EURONEXT

Ridgeview offers £545m for Pinewood Technologies. The US tech investor is paying 448p a share, a 43% premium, for the UK automotive dealership software business. Apax circled the same asset in January and walked away in February. Ridgeview has until 21 August to firm it up or withdraw. PE WIRE

In February Workday's answer was its founder. In August it might be Silver Lake.

Reuters says Silver Lake has spent months in talks over a take-private at more than $50 billion. Six months ago, Workday's answer to the same problem was paying its founder $138.8 million to fix it in public.

Brookfield's $12.5 billion of carry has spent years almost arriving.

Brookfield's release is headlined 15% earnings growth. Consolidated net income fell 33%. Between the two sits $12.5 billion of unrealised carry, of which the firm converted $121 million after selling $40 billion of assets.

What Is a Digital Maturity Assessment?

A structured diagnostic that scores how a company uses digital channels, data and technology to generate revenue, and turns the score into a ranked, costed investment list. What it covers, what the output should be, and why most of them change nothing.

The Ice Cube Test

Sponsored by Crawford McMillan Every investment committee evaluating software right now is pricing a risk none of them has ever measured. Q2 made that expensive. Software deal value fell 65.7% year over year, per PitchBook's Q2 US PE Breakdown, not because buyers think every legacy software business

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In February Workday's answer was its founder. In August it might be Silver Lake.

Brookfield's $12.5 billion of carry has spent years almost arriving.

What Is a Digital Maturity Assessment?

The Ice Cube Test