The Rovati families (formerly Rottapharm) and Sigieri Diaz Della Vittoria Pallavicini, the former right-hand man of Marco Tronchetti Provera in Pirelli and Telecom, Francesco Chiappetta and the former founder of Clessidra, Alessandro Grimaldi, have created, together with other partners a new Italian private equity fund, which will be called Armonia Italy fund and which will debut in the spring. The endowment of the new fund will be 700 million euros and its target will be represented by Made in Italy companies.
Sigieri Diaz will be the president, Luca Rovati and Chiappetta the deputies and Grimaldi the managing director. Armonia will be based in Milan and Rome. The new fund, which will be the private equity financial arm of the GWM group (Global Wealth Management founded by Sigieri Diaz), makes no secret of its ambitions and aims to place itself at the top of Italian funds in open competition with Claudio Sposito's Clessidra and Investindustrial by Andrea Bonomi.
His team will be made up of about thirty managers, coming from private equity or investment banks with at least ten years of experience in the sector.
Fundraising will target large pension funds, banking foundations, hedge funds, insurance companies and university funds. “We have the ambition – explains Sigieri Diaz Della Vittoria Pallavicini – to create a financial institution capable of attracting foreign capital. This is why we will start with a road show to introduce ourselves to foreign investors in London, New York, Hong Kong, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Zurich".
The target will be Made in Italy and those companies of the so-called Fourth Capitalism that have well understood the importance of innovation and internationalization. “The focus – says Grimaldi, former founder of Clessidra as well as financial director of Fininvest and one of the leading private equity experts in Italy – will be on those groups that need to grow with consolidation but also on all medium-sized companies to export. We will be able to invest in sectors such as food, luxury and pharmaceuticals, but also in hitherto neglected fields that have great growth potential”.
The presence of Sigieri Diaz and Rovati among the shareholders are already a sign of the course that Armonia will follow right from the start.
