In a bid to broaden its health care practice and leverage its position as a leading underwriter of not-for-profit health care debt, Ziegler Capital Markets Group has tapped Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co. veterans James Redpath and Neil Borg to run its corporate health care group.
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"The addition of Jim and Neil will allow us to expand our footprint within health care and to utilize our outstanding not-for-profit franchise in health care and senior-living finance," said Thomas R. Paprocki, president of the Ziegler Cos., the parent company of Ziegler Capital Markets.
Ziegler has long been near the top of the public finance health care ranking, but until now, its corporate health care presence has been virtually nonexistent. Last year, Zeigler was ranked fifth nationally in senior-managed public finance health care deals, bringing $2.8 billion in tax-exempt debt to market through 78 issues, for 7.2% of the market flow. This year, the company is in sixth place, having brought $831.3 million to market through 20 deals. Citigroup Global Markets Inc. ranks first with $3.27 billion, according to Thomson Financial.
And while Redpath and Borg will focus primarily on developing and expanding Ziegler's corporate health care practice, Paprocki envisioned many scenarios where they would lend their corporate expertise to traditional not-for-profit health care issuers.
"Its sort of the intersection of public finance and mergers and acquisition," Paprocki said. "If you have investment bankers who are well versed in domestic transactions, they may not be well versed in M&A activity. So at Ziegler, we want clients to get the whole experience."
According to Paprocki, rising real estate values have created the need for many public health care institutions to adopt a more traditionally corporate mentality when assessing their assets. Mergers within some health care systems, or the sale of some assets, could be on the horizon, and that may require the services of professionals with more of a mergers and acquisitions background than a traditional public finance pedigree.
"If a hospital or a senior-living center was being sold, or you're a hospital system and you have a large building and you say to yourself, 'Why is that on my balance sheet? Can I liquidate that?' then we would bring in these folks in some fashion as merger and acquisition specialists to handle the transaction," Paprocki said.
Both Redpath and Borg have extensive merger and acquisition experience. Prior to joining Ziegler, Redpath was co-head of the FBR's health care investment banking practice, where he focused on mergers and acquisitions and raising capital for startup health care services companies. Before joining FBR, Redpath's career included stints as a corporate health care banker for Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., Morgan Stanley, Wasserstein Perella & Co., and Kidder, Peabody & Co.
Borg worked with Redpath for two years at Friedman Billings as a corporate health care banker, where he was a vice president. Prior to that, he worked as a banker at JPMorgan Chase, where he focused on advisory work and private equity investments in the health care and information technology services. (c) 2006 The Bond Buyer and SourceMedia, Inc. All rights reserved. http://www.bondbuyer.com http://www.sourcemedia.com
