Grizzly Research has published a new critical investigative research report on Partners Group Holding AG (SWX:PGHN).
- Partners Group Holding AG (“Partners Group”, “PGHN”) is a Swiss-listed alternative asset manager with approximately US$184.9 billion in assets under management. Partners Group is known for pioneering evergreen funds, which contribute almost half the company’s revenues.
- We dug through the capital structure, underlying holdings, and national filings of Partner’s Group’s biggest evergreen funds, most prominently its Master Fund. We compared our findings to industry peers and consulted with industry experts, former Partners Group employees, and finance professors who expressed grave concern about our findings. One professor commented after reviewing our analysis carefully that the situation is “worse than Wirecard”.
- We found numerous instances where the Master Fund’s valuations did not reconcile with the reality of the underlying businesses. We estimate close to 40% of the evergreen funds’ investments might be severely mismarked.
- The Master Fund’s largest Asia-Pacific holding reports 50 million fewer shares of its key investment to the SEC than it reports to the Hong Kong Companies Registry.
- Partners Group’s Master Fund marked up a Russian pharmaceutical equity investment during the same reporting window in which the Russian state seized the asset by Putin’s decree.
- Often the timing of the investment, the financial performance of the operating companies, and valuation marks seem not to square up. These include a 176.9% markup on a Swedish data-center operator whose revenue fell 18% and operating losses widened 42% over the markup period; an 857.8% common equity markup on a Portuguese biocontrol group whose revenue grew 2.9% year-over-year; and a position whose common equity jumped 383% in 26 days.
- When we were able to back out valuation multiples relatively reliably, we arrived at the conclusion that Partners Group applies multiples for its own valuation that are far in excess of what industry comparisons suggest. Through financial gymnastics, Partners Group arrives at effective valuations that are sometimes more than twice as much as our independently commissioned valuation experts suggested.
- Across the Master Fund’s direct-debt book, reported principal balances moved in ways inconsistent with standard accounting. In many instances, principal value and fair value metrices moved not only by hundreds of percent and in different directions, which is very untypical for a senior loan.
- Partners Group tells investors its private-credit software exposure is “less than half the industry average.” We estimate its actual exposure in the available sample at 32%, which is above the industry average and more than heavily-criticized peers such as Blue Owl Capital.
- Importantly, we do not see the same irregular valuation patterns we saw in Partners Group in the filings of its largest US and European peers. We see attention to Partners Group’s evergreen funds and their valuation marks as a severe risk to the company’s fund-raising ability and long-term financial health.
Introduction: Partners Group a Pioneer in Evergreen Funds
Partners Group is one of Europe’s largest alternative asset managers, with approximately $185 billion in assets under management (“AUM”) as of year-end 2025. The company and its management are often praised for being innovators in the industry. They are credited with pioneering evergreen investment vehicles for private investments as well as bringing access to Private Equity and Private Credit investments to retail investors. An Evergreen fund is exactly what the name implies: It is a permanent investment vehicle as opposed to traditional private equity investment mandates that have a limited time horizon.
Partners Group’s most prominent evergreen fund is its Partners Group Private Equity (Master Fund), LLC (“Master Fund”), with about $15.9 billion Net Assets Value (“NAV”) of the total $56 billion in the evergreen programs. The disclosure below shows how meaningful the financial contribution from the Master Fund alone was and implies that Evergreen Programs’ contribution is almost half of Partners Group’s revenue.
Note: calculation on currency exchange is mostly relied on current rate
We also estimated the financial contribution from both the Master Fund and another one of the biggest evergreen funds in Europe, based on their 2024 financials. This calculation implies that Partners Group generated approximately 45% of its total revenue from its evergreen funds in 2024.
We also note that evergreen funds have been a meaningful contributor to overall fundraising momentum.
Source: Partners Group annual reports
The evergreen programs are important to Partners Group, but reported performance seems to be lacking. The Master Fund underperformed its benchmark in the past 5 years as of March 31, 2025, according to its own disclosure.
Source: Master Fund as of March 31, 2025
The annualized return of the benchmark MSCI World TR was 16.1% in the 5-year window, compared to the Master Fund’s 13.6% during the same period.
Financial media also reported on the lackluster performance at Partners Group’s largest European evergreen fund.
Partners Group made an extraordinary announcement at the beginning of April, underscoring stability and decent fundraising efforts. Only shortly after, the company warned in this Financial Times article that “it will impose limits on investor withdrawals if redemptions rise sharply”.
“Partners Group declined to disclose detailed investment flows for its evergreen funds but said net flows in the firm’s flagship US evergreen private equity fund were broadly similar to late 2025.
The fund entered net redemptions for the first time last year and withdrawal requests reached $750mn in the third quarter, double the same period the year before.”
In an overall precarious Private Equity/Private Credit environment, investors want to be assured about the reliability of the valuations of their investments. This is where we believe Partners Group fails by far the worst amongst all peers.
A Significant Portion of the Equity Portfolio Seems Severely Mismarked
The Master Fund’s Direct Equity portfolio ($9.45 billion) represents 59.39% of the Fund’s NAV as of September 31, 2025. Within that, $4.34 billion is in Western Europe. There are also holdings that were categorized into regions such as Asia–Pacific and the Rest of World.
The reality is that there is little transparency about the detailed financial performance of privately held US-based companies and we usually cannot make a serious assessment of the valuation marks without financial data to cross-check. We do, however, call valuation marks into question in extraordinary circumstances, such as an asset seizure, even when we do not have financials available. We note that the regions where we do have data available show that close to 40% of the valuation marks seem highly questionable.
We compared our findings to the funds of the largest industry peers in Europe as well as in the USA. We did not find irregular patterns that we comparable to our findings in Partners Group. We consulted with over a dozen experts on our findings. A forensic compliance expert commented:
“[J]udging by the figures, there is going to be a scandal with this fund and its portfolio companies worse than the one with Wirecard. Wirecard had a fraud of 4 billion dollars in inflated assets. But here, there could be fraud involving tens of billions in inflated assets of the portfolio companies and the fund itself.
Even from just a surface-level look, there is accounting fraud, investment fraud, and fraud involving loans and offshores.”
Read the full report here by Grizzly Research
