Former Capita director joins Brookland Partners

Brookland Partners has appointed former Capita Asset Services director Jim O’Leary as chief operating officer, Real Estate Capital  can reveal.

O’Leary was Capita’s head of primary servicing, and was best known in recent years for his involvement in some of Europe’s biggest, most complex CMBS restructures.

At Brookland he will help to manage both the advisory business, which includes restructuring and workout, and its CRE debt fund platform called European Real Estate Capital. E-REC was set up recently with Omni Partners which owns a stake in Brookland.

E-REC is building up a lending track record, initially using Omni’s balance sheet. Its first deal was a £23m loan secured on a Liverpool office building with E-REC keeping the £5m mezanine loan and arranging £18m of senior which was placed with an external investor.

O’Leary left Capita’s loan servicing business a year ago, after almost 14 years there and at Capmark, which was acquired by Capita in 2009.

Over five years after the credit crisis, he had leadership roles on restructurings that included Fleet Street II, secured on the Karstadt German retail portfolio, and GRAND the German multifamily deal which was Europe’s largest-ever CMBS restructure at €4.5 billion.

He was also involved in the Capita team which won a €130 billion master servicing mandate from NAMA.

Brookland continues to advise on workouts and earlier this year helped conclude the long-running £1.7 billion General Healthcare Group restructuring, centering on the Theatre (Hospitals) No 1 and No 2 CMBS deals. In that transaction, as in a number of others, Capita and O’Leary had worked alongside Brookland.

Brookland was set up by Nassar Hussain six years ago and has also been diversifying into other debt advisory work. In August, for example, Brookland director Gareck Wilson led a £100m, four-tranche securitisation of short term bridge loans for Amicus Finance with Brookland the co-arranger with HSBC.