Ares Capital Corporation announced today that its investment adviser, Ares Capital Management LLC, has added two investment professionals as part of an expansion of its energy lending capabilities. Owen D. Hill and Jonathan M. Shepko have joined as managing directors to focus on senior and subordinated debt financing opportunities in the oil and gas industry, including upstream, midstream and select service sector opportunities. Hill and Shepko will be based in Ares’ Dallas office and will expand the existing Ares energy team’s focus on project finance and power generating assets.
“The addition of Owen and Jonathan to our team reflects our continuing strategy of expanding our middle market lending capabilities into industries that we believe offer attractive risk adjusted returns to our investors,” said Kipp deVeer, President of Ares Capital. “Our expanded focus on lending to the oil and gas industry is a direct result of the growing market for domestic energy solutions and the changing appetite and risk tolerance of traditional banks for providing debt financing in the industry.”
Hill and Shepko have more than 20 years of combined oil and gas lending experience at various institutions and most recently co-founded and led CLG Energy Finance, LLC, a division of Beal Bank, dedicated to debt financing opportunities in the energy industry. From 2009 through 2013, the team originated more than $1 billion of investments in the oil and gas industry, primarily in the form of senior secured term loans.
“We were attracted to Ares’ strong direct lending platform as well as Ares Capital’s significant and flexible capital to meet the growing demand for credit in the domestic oil and gas industry,” said Messrs. Hill and Shepko. “We believe that our extensive investment experience and relationships are highly complementary to the Ares platform and we look forward to talking to industry participants about how Ares can help with their capital needs or those of their clients.”
Ares Capital is a leading specialty finance company that provides one-stop financing solutions to U.S. middle market companies and private equity sponsors. The company originates and invests in senior secured loans, mezzanine debt and, to a lesser extent, equity investments through its national direct origination platform. Ares Capital’s investment objective is to generate both current income and capital appreciation through debt and equity investments primarily in private companies. Ares Capital has elected to be regulated as a business development company, and is externally managed by a wholly owned subsidiary of Ares Management LLC. Ares Management is a global alternative asset manager and a SEC-registered investment adviser with approximately $74 billion of assets under management as of December 31, 2013.