Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. has raised $12 billion for its largest ever private equity fund, boosting its financial firepower after a period of heavy spending. The Canadian investment firm has committed $3.5 billion of its own money to the BCP VI vehicle, according to a statement on Tuesday, with the remainder coming from investors including pension plans, sovereign wealth funds and family offices. Brookfield has been one of the world’s most active investment firms this year, even as...

Deep-pocketed sovereign funds are deploying billions of dollars to get private equity takeovers across the line, helping grease the wheels of dealmaking in a year when other funding sources are drying up. KKR & Co., EQT AB and Brookfield all turned to wealthy Persian Gulf countries to stump up a lot of the money for big-ticket deals in recent weeks. Sovereign wealth funds spent a record $17.2 billion on such co-investments in the first half, up 24% from the same period last year, according to...

Citigroup Inc. has appointed Hamza Girach and Rizwan Shaikh to lead coverage of emerging markets at its investment bank in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Girach and Shaikh will become co-heads of emerging markets, EMEA, within Citigroup’s banking, capital markets and advisory division, according to an internal memo seen by Bloomberg News. The two dealmakers have worked at Citigroup for roughly two decades. Girach was most recently Middle East investment banking head, while Shaikh ran...

Days before rubbing elbows with global business titans in Davos in January, Arif Naqvi set out to charm another circle of friends—Gulf Arab tycoons—in a last-ditch attempt to save his Dubai private equity firm. But things were already on the cusp of spiraling out of control. Dogged by allegations Abraaj had mismanaged investors’ money, Dubai’s star financier soon couldn’t pay the rent. After Naqvi, 58, surrendered control of Abraaj in June, it was revealed that for years, its main revenues...

A $94 billion financial behemoth is keeping the market on tenterhooks about its next move. Europe’s largest insurer, Allianz SE, is in the early stages of evaluating a variety of potential acquisition targets as deal-hungry Chief Executive Officer Oliver Baete scans the market for growth, people with knowledge of the matter said. Those on the list range from Switzerland’s Zurich Insurance Group AG and the U.K.’s RSA Insurance Group Plc to Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. in the U.S. or,...