Exhibit 99.2
From: | Howard Marks, Bruce Karsh and Jay Wintrob |
Subject: | Oaktree Organizational Announcement |
It’s our great pleasure to announce Oaktree’s decision to partner with Brookfield Asset Management Inc., a world-class, global asset manager with over $350 billion in AUM in the areas of real estate, infrastructure, renewable power and private equity. As detailed in the attached press release issued jointly by us and Brookfield this morning, Brookfield will acquire approximately 62% of Oaktree, and Oaktree will be a free-standing, private company under Brookfield’s umbrella. We are enthusiastic about what this means for Oaktree, for Oaktree’s clients, and for our most important asset – our people.
We are sure you may have questions regarding how – and why – this decision was made, and so we’d like to provide you with some important background.
As those of you who were at Oaktree in 2003 may recall, in his memo2002 in Review, Howard mentioned that a money management industry newsletter had described us as having put the firm up for sale. He went on as follows:
We told those who inquired that we had hired Goldman Sachs three years earlier to help us evaluate offers for a minority interest fromwould-be investors and see if we could do better. But obviously nothing had been consummated in three years. And now it’s four.
…Our requirements have always been unambiguous:
| (a) | a prestigious affiliation that would bring resources to Oaktree, |
| (b) | with a party willing to pay a fair price for anon-controlling investment that would entail |
| (c) | no cessation of Oaktree’s existence as an autonomous entity, |
| (d) | no diminution of Oaktree’s role in representing its own products to clients, and |
| (e) | no reduction of our freedom to manage our accounts and our business. |
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that these stringent criteria haven’t been met, and as a result we have decided to place this topic and our work with Goldman solidly on the back burner. However improbable a transaction was a year ago, we consider it even less likely now.
That mention prompted a group of Oaktree clients to respond that they would do what we had indicated, and they bought a total of 13% of Oaktree on those terms in 2004 and 2007. Following that, as you know, we went semi-public in 2007 and fully public in 2012.
All of us have operated the firm on a “client-first” basis since our founding in 1995. Unfortunately, however, as a public company, we’ve experienced the public market’s lack of enthusiasm for an asset manager that’s more concerned with its clients’ interests than with growing AUM and profits when it thinks growing would be a mistake. At the same time, the public listing hasn’t provided all of the liquidity we sought in order to facilitate generational transfer.