AlixPartners appoints Global Head of Strategy and Business Development
International consultancy AlixPartners has appointed a new Global Head of Strategy and Business Development for the firm’s turnaround practice. Strategy and financial services veteran Greg Donat, who will work from New York’s office, will also become a Managing Director.
The turnaround wing at AlixPartners has been at the heart of some of the most prominent administrations and restructuring operations in the world over the past 12 months. Croatia’s largest employer, Agrokor, engaged the firm as administrator early in 2017, while troubled Poundland owner Steinhoff drafted in AlixPartners at the turn of the year. 2018 has seen the spate of high profile work continue, with the consultancy tasked to aid ailing casual dining chain Prezzos with its restructuring plan in the spring.
As AlixPartners prepares for continued demand, as a number of notable high street names in the UK particularly continue to flounder, the firm has announced that Greg Donat, a 20-plus-year strategy and financial industry stalwart with deep roots in hedge funds and other private-capital sectors, has joined the firm’s Turnaround & Restructuring Practice as Global Head of Strategy and Business Development. His new role sees him charged with using his analytical and marketing skills to further enhance the Turnaround & Restructuring Practice’s strategies and business development, and to help the firm better serve its clients. He also becomes a Managing Director at the firm.
Since 2011, Donat had been a Partner at Casablanca Capital, co-leading day-to-day operations at a hedge fund based in New York which raised more than $500 million and participated in numerous industry verticals. At the same time, he also served as President of Hawkview, a New York-based strategy and financial-advisory firm, which he also founded and will remain at while taking on his new position at AlixPartners. The legal firm advised the governor of Maryland, among others, on high-level financial issues.
Donat has spent a large section of his career in legal work. In the late 1990s, he was an attorney at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York, working on securities, M&A, and restructuring matters, including serving as counsel on debt and equity offerings and commercial-lending transactions. From there, he moved into the financial industry with the Banc of America Securities in New York, where he was a Principal and where he worked with the energy and power, software and services, media and telecommunications, and gaming industries. Following that engagement Donat spent five years at the investment bank Lazard Freres & Company where he was a Director in the Power, Energy & Infrastructure group, working closely with that firm’s restructuring practice and forging significant relationships with pension funds and sovereign wealth funds.
He holds a juris doctor degree from Columbia Law School at Columbia University in New York City and a bachelor’s degree from Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Donat is also the holder of master of fine arts degree from The American Film Institute Conservatory in Los Angeles, California.
Commenting on the new arrival, Simon Freakley, CEO of AlixPartners said, “AlixPartners’ Turnaround and Restructuring group has long been the gold standard in its industry, and we look for Greg’s progressive thinking and innovations to help our professionals in that practice take things to even greater heights for our clients. And that includes making sure that even more potential clients are aware of the of the broad array of services, and the deep expertise across those services, that AlixPartners has to offer them.”
