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I can confirm, be extra careful with Parigi Equity. These people should not be trusted. The typical italian liars pretending to be big bankers, investors. They are not who they claim to be and are hungry for money, and have poor business experience. The CEO Giampaolo Parigi has been condemned for fraud by Banca Italia for his previous role in Cofimo.
I also had a negative experience with Parigi Equity Partners in real estate business and in some projects in CIS.
Mr. Parigi is a good speaker and in a first approach you can be easily get involved, but be careful, behind his speech there is nothing, only avidity for your money. Contracts he makes are standard templates and you will be always disadvantaged from it.
Furthermore the firm does not have a permanent (and qualified) staff; associates change quickly and most of them are incompetent. But they do not get fired, they run away from that office. Recently I get to know why: Mr. Parigi does not consider it necessary to pay them. So he pretends to be well paid in advance for his so called “coordination”, “clean signature” and “expertise”, but at the same time do not pay people working with him and for him, it’s a shame...
So it is a real Italian firm doing “Italian Job”!
Mr. Parigi is a good speaker and in a first approach you can be easily get involved, but be careful, behind his speech there is nothing, only avidity for your money. Contracts he makes are standard templates and you will be always disadvantaged from it.
Furthermore the firm does not have a permanent (and qualified) staff; associates change quickly and most of them are incompetent. But they do not get fired, they run away from that office. Recently I get to know why: Mr. Parigi does not consider it necessary to pay them. So he pretends to be well paid in advance for his so called “coordination”, “clean signature” and “expertise”, but at the same time do not pay people working with him and for him, it’s a shame...
So it is a real Italian firm doing “Italian Job”!
i'm agreed with all comments!!!be careful and dont listen the fairy tails of the Parigi's great partners (like parlaments of the some countries o the biggest world banks). Mr. Parigi is typical swindler!
What an interesting page I wished I had come across earlier.
Allow me to share the experience of the 'great opportunity' I had to work with 'Doctor' Giampaolo Parigi on a deal to set up a joint cross-border investment fund with them. After an excellent first contact and good kick off meetings (Dr Parigi is a bright speaker, masters many languages, is very knowledgeable and educated on many topics, convincing, you can really easily feel involved) it was unfortunately a series of disappointments and mishaps until it all collapsed after a few months. Because I was misled and this cost me time, money and disappointment, before dropping the deal, I have tried to understand: why? That was some years ago, but I doubt any of the following has changed.
1. Everything he claims always sounds great, but is completely exaggerated if not totally untrue: that goes for track record, financial standing, political or business connections, mandates, team, offices, clients, etc. If you check seriously anything he says it almost never, ever, passes the reality test (maybe 5% of what he claims is true, the rest is nonsense). Many transactions are made up in the sense that he considers that working on a transaction is actually equivalent to ‘closing’ a transaction, which makes it easy to conclude proudly ‘our Group executes 100 transactions a year’.
2. Quite interestingly, they often present themselves as a Private Equity family ‘Group’ or ‘Fund’ sitting over several hundred million US$ assets. Nice. But in reality, because they do not at all have such financial standing, they are desperately looking for advisory mandates and fees for a living and are hungry to grasp stakes and shares in businesses that they 'structure' with you and for you. Be extra careful if you are an entrepreneur. We were asked to inject the first million € to ‘prove ourselves’ (and ‘reassure him’ that his ‘clean name and signature’ would not be violated) and he would have got c. 30% of shares and full management control and he would have ‘topped up’ his equity commitment ‘at a later stage’ whenever needed. We started to have serious doubts when we were provided with the draft transaction documents (Information Memorandum; term sheet…) in terms of just basic content (almost void), capacity to execute and finance their share, governance, and generally honesty of the deal on the table.
3. Then you require seeing financial statements and a chart of group ownership of his activities. He always escapes the question by saying he is an ‘unconsolidated’ PE group (whatever that means) and therefore there is nothing to show, in other words you are not grounded to ask questions, and by the way who are you to ask references? Kindly refers to his old time admission in 'International Business Who's Who' to escape serious questions.
4. That one was fun. Dr Parigi initially claimed to have ‘excellent relations’ with top management of 2 large European banks that could ease the process to provide debt financing to leverage the transaction. At a later stage it appeared clearly that he did not have any such connections and asked us to seek the contacts ourselves.
5. Dr Parigi claims to be highly specialized in everything, everywhere, from VC to Debt, to Capital Markets (MTNs, Equities, commodity trading...), and from Energy to Finance to Logistics to Ports, to Shipbuilding, and Real Estate, and from Europe, to CIS, North America, Asia, Oceania and Africa. Just have a look to his profile on linkedin or VC 4 Africa (vc4a). He is also lecturing in universities and active in industry panels, and tries to be part of several boards (Italian – Russian chamber of commerce for instance) or committees to try to gain some substance.
6. You may hear Dr Parigi claim that his Group has offices around the world with more than 50 partners and associates working for him. That’s totally untrue and where he confuses the concept of 'own staff and offices' with just 'contacts' or ‘partners’. And speaking about staff, I had a direct chat with some former Parigi staff (all ran away since then) that were lucky enough to be part of his 'firm' Private Office (actually just a few unpaid juniors crunching data and trying to develop his horrible business for free, struggling to draft poor quality IM), they quickly got to understand and confess what reality was: a Web of Lies.
7. As reported elsewhere on this page, he indeed does not consider necessary to pay his staff. He makes nice promises to juniors (and sometimes attracts even seniors, and business partners), that their time has come and they will make a lot of money with him, working on 'cross-border, complex, fascinating transactions’ and cash in their fair share of success fees and carried interest of deals that only him in the world has the recipe (or the 'Parigi Formula' as he says, I recall his pretentious word that investment banks are stupid and poorly managed when compared to his firm) and, of course, already has the mandates because the world runs to speak to him first. So, nothing to worry about, a great firm to work for or deal with!
That's where the boomerang comes back in the face of Dr Parigi. Because his world does not exist, the fees and funds never come. Unless people fool themselves, the deals do not materialize. People do not get paid, the deals collapse. And one beautiful day, eventually, they run away. Staff, partners and clients run away. It is as simple as that: a web of lies.
There is a Russian saying that ‘character is fatal’. Dr Giampaolo Parigi is a great dreamer, caressing the dream of being an international finance tycoon and entrepreneur guru. But because this does not happen (hey, he is not Madoff!), he is ready to a few 'arrangements' with reality to make his dream come true.
Sadly (or not) the recent actual fact is that the firm 'Parigi Equity Partners' (Milan based) went bankrupt and was liquidated in 2016 (and the website has since then disappeared). So one can wonder: what is the 'privately-held, diversified investment Group' ‘unconsolidated’ business in which he still pretends to be Chairman of the Board?
His involvement in US-based PE fund 'Black Hawk Partners' in 2014 has since then disappeared from the radar…
Be extremely careful in any business, investment, work, or think tank proposal with the guys. Do not trust a priori, do your due diligence seriously, check everything, deals, financial statements, accounts, people, structure, team, office, KYC, and you will see. But after all, maybe the Formula has changed, or is it the same pizza?
Or spare your time, take the short cut, and as the song goes, just ‘runaway’.
Allow me to share the experience of the 'great opportunity' I had to work with 'Doctor' Giampaolo Parigi on a deal to set up a joint cross-border investment fund with them. After an excellent first contact and good kick off meetings (Dr Parigi is a bright speaker, masters many languages, is very knowledgeable and educated on many topics, convincing, you can really easily feel involved) it was unfortunately a series of disappointments and mishaps until it all collapsed after a few months. Because I was misled and this cost me time, money and disappointment, before dropping the deal, I have tried to understand: why? That was some years ago, but I doubt any of the following has changed.
1. Everything he claims always sounds great, but is completely exaggerated if not totally untrue: that goes for track record, financial standing, political or business connections, mandates, team, offices, clients, etc. If you check seriously anything he says it almost never, ever, passes the reality test (maybe 5% of what he claims is true, the rest is nonsense). Many transactions are made up in the sense that he considers that working on a transaction is actually equivalent to ‘closing’ a transaction, which makes it easy to conclude proudly ‘our Group executes 100 transactions a year’.
2. Quite interestingly, they often present themselves as a Private Equity family ‘Group’ or ‘Fund’ sitting over several hundred million US$ assets. Nice. But in reality, because they do not at all have such financial standing, they are desperately looking for advisory mandates and fees for a living and are hungry to grasp stakes and shares in businesses that they 'structure' with you and for you. Be extra careful if you are an entrepreneur. We were asked to inject the first million € to ‘prove ourselves’ (and ‘reassure him’ that his ‘clean name and signature’ would not be violated) and he would have got c. 30% of shares and full management control and he would have ‘topped up’ his equity commitment ‘at a later stage’ whenever needed. We started to have serious doubts when we were provided with the draft transaction documents (Information Memorandum; term sheet…) in terms of just basic content (almost void), capacity to execute and finance their share, governance, and generally honesty of the deal on the table.
3. Then you require seeing financial statements and a chart of group ownership of his activities. He always escapes the question by saying he is an ‘unconsolidated’ PE group (whatever that means) and therefore there is nothing to show, in other words you are not grounded to ask questions, and by the way who are you to ask references? Kindly refers to his old time admission in 'International Business Who's Who' to escape serious questions.
4. That one was fun. Dr Parigi initially claimed to have ‘excellent relations’ with top management of 2 large European banks that could ease the process to provide debt financing to leverage the transaction. At a later stage it appeared clearly that he did not have any such connections and asked us to seek the contacts ourselves.
5. Dr Parigi claims to be highly specialized in everything, everywhere, from VC to Debt, to Capital Markets (MTNs, Equities, commodity trading...), and from Energy to Finance to Logistics to Ports, to Shipbuilding, and Real Estate, and from Europe, to CIS, North America, Asia, Oceania and Africa. Just have a look to his profile on linkedin or VC 4 Africa (vc4a). He is also lecturing in universities and active in industry panels, and tries to be part of several boards (Italian – Russian chamber of commerce for instance) or committees to try to gain some substance.
6. You may hear Dr Parigi claim that his Group has offices around the world with more than 50 partners and associates working for him. That’s totally untrue and where he confuses the concept of 'own staff and offices' with just 'contacts' or ‘partners’. And speaking about staff, I had a direct chat with some former Parigi staff (all ran away since then) that were lucky enough to be part of his 'firm' Private Office (actually just a few unpaid juniors crunching data and trying to develop his horrible business for free, struggling to draft poor quality IM), they quickly got to understand and confess what reality was: a Web of Lies.
7. As reported elsewhere on this page, he indeed does not consider necessary to pay his staff. He makes nice promises to juniors (and sometimes attracts even seniors, and business partners), that their time has come and they will make a lot of money with him, working on 'cross-border, complex, fascinating transactions’ and cash in their fair share of success fees and carried interest of deals that only him in the world has the recipe (or the 'Parigi Formula' as he says, I recall his pretentious word that investment banks are stupid and poorly managed when compared to his firm) and, of course, already has the mandates because the world runs to speak to him first. So, nothing to worry about, a great firm to work for or deal with!
That's where the boomerang comes back in the face of Dr Parigi. Because his world does not exist, the fees and funds never come. Unless people fool themselves, the deals do not materialize. People do not get paid, the deals collapse. And one beautiful day, eventually, they run away. Staff, partners and clients run away. It is as simple as that: a web of lies.
There is a Russian saying that ‘character is fatal’. Dr Giampaolo Parigi is a great dreamer, caressing the dream of being an international finance tycoon and entrepreneur guru. But because this does not happen (hey, he is not Madoff!), he is ready to a few 'arrangements' with reality to make his dream come true.
Sadly (or not) the recent actual fact is that the firm 'Parigi Equity Partners' (Milan based) went bankrupt and was liquidated in 2016 (and the website has since then disappeared). So one can wonder: what is the 'privately-held, diversified investment Group' ‘unconsolidated’ business in which he still pretends to be Chairman of the Board?
His involvement in US-based PE fund 'Black Hawk Partners' in 2014 has since then disappeared from the radar…
Be extremely careful in any business, investment, work, or think tank proposal with the guys. Do not trust a priori, do your due diligence seriously, check everything, deals, financial statements, accounts, people, structure, team, office, KYC, and you will see. But after all, maybe the Formula has changed, or is it the same pizza?
Or spare your time, take the short cut, and as the song goes, just ‘runaway’.
For those who read Italian, you will read in the press that his partner in the firm Mr Riccardo Romeri (actually Dr Parigi’s father-in-law) was arrested early 2017 in Italy in connection with the fraudulent bankruptcy of Parigi Equity Partners (‘bancarotta fraudolenta’) following a request from a Milan judge.
In the meantime Dr Parigi has apparently timely relocated to London. See http://www.procura.sondrio.giustizia.it/allegatinews/A_13203.pdf (page 15)
In the meantime Dr Parigi has apparently timely relocated to London. See http://www.procura.sondrio.giustizia.it/allegatinews/A_13203.pdf (page 15)
Indeed the various press articles (easy to understand even for non Italian speakers) mention fraudulent bankruptcy and forfeited balance sheet. Leaving creditors and advisors unpaid after voiding the firm from its cash before leaving it go into bankruptcy.
Waow! Time to "Shine on, you Crazy Diamond"!
These people are a shame to their country, and contribute to give a bad reputation to Italy and its business climate.
Тупой лжец!
Waow! Time to "Shine on, you Crazy Diamond"!
These people are a shame to their country, and contribute to give a bad reputation to Italy and its business climate.
Тупой лжец!
I would appreciate your feedback