HPS Investment Partners, Oak Hill Advisors, One Investment Management & BC Partners take majority stake in GardaWorld Security

Structured as the largest private company buyout in Canadian history, this recapitalization agreement enables an investment consortium led by founder Stephan Cretier and HPS Investment Partners to officially acquire majority control of GardaWorld from the private equity firm BC Partners. The definitive transaction, finalizing an enterprise valuation of CAD 10–25bn, reconfigures the existing shareholder structure by allocating exactly 70 percent of the equity directly to the target's Chief Executive Officer alongside select management executives. Concurrently, the acquiring institutional syndicate (featuring Oak Hill Advisors and One Investment Management) secures the remaining capital blocks, while the exiting financial sponsor actively retains a localized minority interest to support future execution. At the time of this massive structural transfer, the target generated an annual EBITDA exceeding CAD 1–10bn. The financial architecture governing this divestment is explicitly engineered to remain completely leverage-neutral, deliberately avoiding the imposition of any new debt financing at the level of the target or its operational subsidiaries. For the exiting primary shareholder, which originally partnered with the organization in 2019, this liquidity event crystallizes a sustained period of aggressive organic expansion that successfully doubled the entity's profitability. This strategic maneuver officially concludes a private equity holding cycle that contributed to an annual internal rate of return of 30 percent since the enterprise initially went private in 2012. Subject to customary closing conditions, the finalization of this complex cross-border transfer is formally anticipated by February 28, 2025. To orchestrate the multifaceted legal perimeters of this capital restructuring, the institutional buyers mandated the law firm Stikeman Elliott. The designated advisory team comprehensively managed the transaction components, featuring Jeff Hershenfield, Shawn Blundell, Daniel Weiss, Alexandra Ghelerter, Jaskaran Lamba, and Isaac Ameerally handling the primary mergers and acquisitions frameworks. Additionally, this legal consortium included John O'Connor, Dean Kraus, and Rebekah Dong overseeing tax structuring; Neil Shapiro and Frank Bozzo managing real estate provisions; and Michael Kilby executing strict regulatory compliance audits.

In the past, the company had already been the subject of several LBOs, notably led by Apax Partners in 2012 and BC Partners in 2019. This succession of buyouts highlights the strong attractiveness of the company's business model.