Lord Sainsbury’s family office plots £253m investment into private equity funds
Lord David Sainsbury, the great grandson of Sainsbury’s founder, plans to bet big on private equity funds through his family office Innotech Advisers, according to a UK registry filing.
The London-based firm, which has stepped away from public markets to invest in private companies – predominantly through loans and participation in limited partnerships with independent managers – plans to funnel as much as £253m into PE funds, Bloomberg first reported.
As of the end of last year, the family office already had north of £400m allocated to managed funds in the buyout sector, and its portfolio of investments had a market value of £1.1bn, according to the registry filing.
This value had increased by more than £3m from £718m since 2019, and Innotech “remains in a strong position to take advantage of any suitable investment opportunities,” it said in its recently filed 2020 accounts.
While Lord Sainsbury originally divested all of his 92m shares in the grocer in 2010 to the family office, which owned a 5 per cent stake worth around £270m in 2011, by the end of 2018, Innotech had sold all of its shares, according to company filings.
In the same period, the family office upped its investments in private equity funds by more than 40 per cent.
In the wake of the private equity buyout of fellow UK supermarket giant Morrisons earlier this year, investors speculated that Sainsbury’s could be next in line, after the grocer lost almost a third of its value in the past two decades.
Innotech Advisers has been contacted for comment.