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ICICI Venture Hires Parth Gandhi; Shailesh Pathak Quits

By Shrija Agrawal

  • 02 Sep 2009

India's largest private equity fund ICICI Venture is on a top management  recast. While the firm has hired Parth Gandhi as President, it's also seeing the exit of Shailesh Pathak, a former IAS officer and one of the senior directors at the firm. Gandhi has joined ICICI Venture from Navigator Capital Advisors, the advisory arm of the UK based hedge fund, Fursa. Gandhi will report to Vishakha Mulye, MD & CEO of ICICI Venture.

Gandhi's entry is coinciding (though not related) with the exit of Pathak, who was looking after infrastructure investments at ICICI Venture. Pathak is said to be joining an infrastructure focused fund. When contacted by VCCircle, Pathak confirmed he is joining a new firm, but refused to give details. Pathak is an IAS officer turned private equity fund manager.

He has experience in executing infrastructure projects in public-private partnership. He had joined ICICI Venture two years ago, and was expected to raise an infrastructure focused fund for the firm. Pathak was also last year rumoured to be considered for the CEO's job at Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor, a joint project of India and Japan.

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Besides Gandhi, ICICI Venture has recently made another senior level appointment in Prashant Purkar who has joined as President. Prior to this, Purkar was Managing Director & Head-Global Finance of Nomura India and Lehman Brothers.

The new appointments have also coincided with the firm's redesignation of all senior directors in private equity team as presidents. The firm has now five presidents and three directors in private equity team looking after various industry verticals managing over $1 billion in private equity corpus. Some of them report to Mulye, who is the MD & CEO, and some to Rajeev Bakshi, who is the Joint Managing Director.

Besides Gandhi and Purkar, the three other presidents include Sumit Chandwani, Jayanta Banerjee (both of them have been with the firm since the early part of the decade) and K.S. Jangbahadur who joined from JP Morgan. The three directors include Anand Vyas, Vandana Rajadhyaksha and Sunay Mathure most of whom have been with the firm since 2001.

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Gandhi was a managing director with Navigator Capital Advisors, which is the exclusive India Investment Advisor to the US based private equity fund, Vision Global Investments LLC. and its sister fund, Fursa Alternative Strategies LLC, a multistrategy hedge fund. He also serves on the boards of H2Gen Inc., Business India Publications Pvt Ltd, Business India Exhibitions Pvt Ltd, and Gayatri Starchkem Ltd.

With two new appointments at senior level under a new MD & CEO, ICICI Venture seems to be rebuilding its professional bandwidth. Former ICICI Bank executive Mulye succeeded Renuka Ramnath, who had left the firm in April to form her own fund. The firm had also seen the exit of executives like Sudhir Variyar, a senior director, Shweta Jalan, a director in private equity investments team, and Pradeep Varshney, a senior director in the real estate team.

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