Swiss Buyout Titans Make Progress in Bid to Prevent EU Deal

(Bloomberg) — The founders of private equity firm Partners Group Holding AG have taken a step closer to making it harder for Switzerland to pass a new deal to reorganize relations with the European Union.

Switzerland is due to hold a national vote on the accord, and an organization backed by Alfred Gantner, Marcel Erni and Urs Wietlisbach want a higher bar for approval. The group has collected enough signatures — more than 111,000 — to hold a separate plebiscite on the rules of the vote on the EU deal, the government said Tuesday.

Gantner, Erni and Wietlisbach are among the most high profile business figures in Switzerland. The Goldman alumni built Partners Group into one of Europe’s largest alternative asset managers with more than $150 billion of assets under management and money in everything from companies to infrastructure and real estate.

The executives today run their own family office, and still large shareholders and limited partners of the private equity firm. They have argued in the past that the EU deal “damages Switzerland.”

The billionaires’ proposal foresees that for the EU deal to be approved in a vote, it would require not only a majority of the Swiss people on a national level, but also by majorities in more than half of the country’s cantons, or states.

The crucial question is now whether the plan will be voted on before or after the EU plebiscite. It can only succeed in harming the deal if it takes place before the other vote.

Partners Group maintains that the political engagement of its founders is a personal matter and that the EU deal has no relevance or influence on the business of the firm.

–With assistance from Jan-Henrik Förster.

(Updates with background on Partners Group founders starting in third paragraph.)

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