Management
COMMITTED TO EXCELLENCE
The special knowledge that underpins SC Lowy’s unique model springs from a team committed to establishing the only independent fixed income specialist with full investment bank capabilities. The founders created SC Lowy in the belief that the market needed a less bureaucratic, more responsive type of service to build a legacy of enduring investment banking excellence.
Our management team
MICHEL LÖWY
CO-FOUNDER & CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
SC LOWY
In 2009, Michel Löwy co-founded SC Lowy. As CEO, Michel brings more than 20 years of experience building teams. The firm’s professionals combine decades of industry leadership across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas, focusing on loans, bonds, trade claims and special situations.
Prior to founding SC Lowy, Michel led Deutsche Bank’s strategic investment group and built market-leading franchises in Asia, Japan and Latin America. Previously, he built Cargill’s Value Investment Group in Singapore and invested in the first Japanese NPLs in the late 1990s.
Michel started his career at Arthur Andersen in Brussels. He holds an MA in Business Engineering from Solvay Business School and is a European Certified Financial Analyst.
In 2012, Michel was honoured with the Asia Pacific Entrepreneurship Award.
MICHEL LÖWY
Co-Founder and CEO
Michel Löwy has been investing in fixed income Asian assets since moving to the region with Cargill’s value investment group in the wake of the financial crisis in 1998. He was soon poached by Deutsche Bank, along with SC Lowy co-founder Soo Cheon Lee and senior adviser Peter Tolhurst, where together they spent the next decade building a consistently profitable and market-leading Asian special situations group.
By the time of the global financial crisis in 2008, when he anticipated that bulge-bracket investment banks would struggle to provide the platform needed, Michel and Soo Cheon made the decision to establish SC Lowy as an independent fixed income specialist.
Boutique investment banking
His role within the firm has evolved since those early days, when his principal goal was to make sure the firm had sufficient capital to operate and, as the only trader, to ensure it was making money. Today, while he still trades the biggest book in the firm and generates trading ideas, more of his time is devoted to management and strategy. As the business has matured, he has overseen an expansion from secondary loans into high yield bonds, debt capital markets and par loans, as well as building SC Lowy’s presence in Europe through an office in London.
International expansion
A Belgian citizen, Michel started his career at Arthur Andersen in Brussels, where he immediately gained a broad understanding of the corporate world. “The advantage of being in a small country like Belgium is that you’re not super specialised,” he says. “Instead of being stuck in a box such as ‘pharma’ or ‘banks’, I had the opportunity to experience many different industries — a construction company one week, then an airport operator, a building materials manufacturer, a brokerage.”
That experience led to a move to Cargill in London, where he first worked for Peter, and then a transfer to Singapore, where he started working with Soo Cheon shortly thereafter.
At SC Lowy, Michel sought to bring all of this experience together — the analytical skills he first developed at Arthur Andersen, the collegial atmosphere of a buyside firm like Cargill and the discipline of a bulge-bracket investment bank, not to mention his own leadership from the trading floor.
Dynamics of distressed debt
Indeed, he has also found an outlet for those leadership skills outside the office — he began coaching his son and several other kids at basketball a few years ago and quickly learned that coaching and trading share many similarities.
“How do you become a good coach? It’s about getting everybody to buy into your game plan and your strategy, working as a team and finding ways to communicate so that everybody works well together,” he says. “On the trading floor, it’s the same thing. You need to get the sourcing, analysts, sales to all work with each other and as a trader you’re sort of the coach in the middle.”
Of course, he is also a competitive person in his own right, and extends this competitiveness to the firm’s charitable activities. He had the chance to reflect on what it means to be a good corporate citizen during a trail-running race in Hong Kong in 2015, when a nine-metre fall off a mountain left him wedged between two trees and dependent on the grace of strangers to rescue him. His conclusion? “You have to do good when you can.”
But you also have to focus on how to do good best. SC Lowy’s answer has been to act with the discipline of an investor through corporate-charitable foundation partnerships and has been involved with the Emerging Markets Foundation, EMpower, since raising money through another trail-running race in Nepal in 2012.
SOO CHEON LEE
CO-FOUNDER & CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER
SC LOWY
Prior to founding SC Lowy, Soo Cheon was Managing Director and Head of in-house Research and Trading at Deutsche Bank’s Distressed Products Group in Asia Pacific, managing a diversified trading book, hard asset real estate holdings and significant distressed non-performing loan portfolios across Asia.
Prior to Deutsche Bank, Soo Cheon was a senior research analyst at Cargill’s Value Investment Group, based in Singapore. Soo Cheon holds an MBA from the University of St. Thomas and is a US Certified Public Accountant.
SOO CHEON LEE
CO-FOUNDER & CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER
Soo Cheon is the SC in SC Lowy and is responsible for the investment side of the business. He has been analysing distressed opportunities alongside Michel Lowy for almost 20 years, dating back to the Asian financial crisis, when they helped to build Cargill’s distressed business in the region.
In 2000, he followed Michel to Deutsche Bank and, during the next nine years, was instrumental in building the leading special situations unit in Asia. By the time they left, Soo Cheon and Michel’s team had a 60% market share in regional distressed debt trading. But when the global financial crisis hit in 2008-2009, it led to fundamental changes in the investment banking model that encouraged the pair to strike out on their own.
Setting up in competition with the world’s biggest financial institutions was not without its challenges, and the huge injection of liquidity by central banks around the world in the wake of the financial crisis meant that asset prices had recovered much of their value by the time SC Lowy was up and running.
“We missed some opportunities to invest during the time we were on gardening leave,” says Soo Cheon. “There were credits I wanted to buy when they were at 40 cents on the dollar, but by the time we were able to invest many had recovered to 80 or 90 cents.”
Even so, subsequent changes to capital requirements and compliance obligations for the bulge-bracket banks soon vindicated the decision to set up an independent firm.
Since then, Soo Cheon has been the driving force behind several landmark deals in his native Korea, including the country’s first debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing of its kind for marine transportation services company Korea Line Corporation that helped rehabilitate the company ahead of a sale to TK Chemical. That award-winning deal raised the firm’s profile in Korea and was followed by SC Lowy’s acquisition of a local mutual savings bank, Shinmin, which has been turned around and is now generating positive operating profit.
Soo Cheon took advantage of the experience with Korea Line to win the trust of a second bankrupt Korean shipping company, Pan Ocean. In another award-winning transaction, he helped it to reorganise and find a new owner in the form of Harim, which bought a 58% stake in the company in the biggest shipping deal of 2015.
This was not the career Soo Cheon planned when he joined Cargill out of his MBA. As a CPA on the management-training programme, his goal was to become CFO for the Korean business, but he met Michel soon after arriving at Cargill’s Asian HQ in Singapore and was eventually persuaded to join the value investment group to help analyse Korean non-performing loans. He has been picking profitable opportunities ever since.
This desire to keep learning and challenging himself has played an important role in Soo Cheon’s successful career and is also reflected outside the office, where he can recently be found learning to play tennis.
Jamie Tadelis
CO-FOUNDER AND HEAD OF SALES
SC LOWY
Jamie oversees sales and distribution for SC Lowy’s Asian clients. He has over 15 years’ experience with distressed-focused and special-situations transactions including structuring, negotiating and executing large complex corporate restructurings and single asset trading names.
Previously he held positions at Abax Global Capital in Hong Kong and Avenue Capital Group in New York and Hong Kong. Before Avenue, he was an attorney in the bankruptcy and creditors’ rights group at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel and an associate in JP Morgan’s emerging markets derivatives group in New York.
Jamie Tadelis
Wall Street lawyer to Asia high yield – A remarkable family story
Jamie leads SC Lowy’s global sales team across Hong Kong, London and New York, drawing on years of experience as a hedge fund COO, restructuring lawyer and credit specialist to cover our hedge fund clients.
As a co-founder, Jamie has been with SC Lowy since Day 1 and knows the business inside out. In his original role as general counsel and compliance officer, he established the firm’s corporate entity and secured all the necessary licenses from the SFC in Hong Kong. He even came up with the name.
However, it wasn’t long after the firm’s launch that he moved to the front office and started generating revenue, drawing on a career that had included working on credit derivatives on Wall Street in the 1990s; as a restructuring lawyer on landmark corporate failures such as Enron and Worldcom; and as COO and compliance officer for one of the biggest hedge fund launches in Asia — just before the global financial crisis.
Such broad experience is a big part of SC Lowy’s edge. Understanding the universe of credit, finance, restructuring and hedge funds allows Jamie to speak knowledgeably to clients and to anticipate their needs.
And while the intensity of his job is undeniable, Jamie brings a sense of perspective that comes from even more intense personal challenges. His wife Amy was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer at 28, so the four children currently running around the Tadelis home are a constant reminder of what all the hard work is for.
The twin girls were born after Amy’s sister-in-law generously offered to act as a gestational carrier — a remarkable story that gained national attention in the U.S., including a television interview with news anchor Katie Couric (see below). After arriving in Hong Kong, Jamie and Amy added to the family by adopting a local boy. He was quickly welcomed into the family by his new big sisters and has since been joined by his own little sister, who was also in the adoption system. He was again asked to tell his story.
But he is quick to point out that balancing home life and the job is extremely important. He just wishes there was more time for basketball.
Peter Tolhurst
SENIOR ADVISOR
SC LOWY EUROPE
Peter Tolhurst joined SC Lowy in 2012 and is responsible for European strategy. Peter was formerly Global Co-Head of Strategic Investment Group at Deutsche Bank, with specific responsibilities for Europe, Asia and Japan.
Previous roles at Deutsche Bank included oversight of the Strategic Investment Group portfolio investment business and special situation business. Peter also set up and ran Deutsche Bank’s business in Japan and China.
Prior to Deutsche Bank, he established and managed Cargill’s Asia Pacific Value Investment business. Peter earned an MBA from City University (London) and a BSc in Chemical Engineering from Loughborough University of Technology.
Peter Tolhurst
SENIOR ADVISOR
SC LOWY EUROPE
Having started out as a chemical engineer in the industrial gas sector, Peter’s talents took him to the City in the 1980s and he soon found his way to a job working in Cargill’s European corporate distressed team.
It was while working in this role that he hired Michel Löwy from Arthur Andersen, beginning a professional relationship that has seen them build multiple successful distressed debt trading businesses, each one more successful than the last.
They arrived in Asia with Cargill in 1998 in the wake of the region’s financial crisis and spent two years building a regional distressed business, with Peter responsible for Japan and Michel the rest of Asia. The street soon noticed their success and Deutsche Bank poached them both in 1999 to once again build an Asian distressed business from scratch. Peter retained responsibility for Japan and also started a China business, enjoying a consistently profitable track record.
He handed his businesses over to Michel in 2005 and returned to the UK with a view to retiring and enjoying the fruits of a successful career. “I had been promising my partner (now wife) I was going to quit,” says Peter, who has still not quite managed to retire more than 10 years later. “I used to resign every year but was always enticed back. Fortunately I’m better at investing than I was at retiring.”
After four years of not-quite-resigning, Peter finally quit Deutsche at the end of 2009, after staying for a while as co-global head to help stabilise the business after Michel and other senior members of the distressed debt management team had quit earlier in the year.
In 2010, he married in Tuscany in front of friends and family, including Michel (photo below), and managed a short break on the beach before he was back looking at situations in Ireland for SC Lowy. He has been a driving force behind the firm’s growth in Europe ever since.
Despite setting out with modest expectations in the highly competitive European market, the business has quickly established itself as a competitive force in its own right. Peter puts the success down to SC Lowy’s unique proposition: good trading skills, good risk analysis, good capital deployment skills and the kind of diligence that comes with decades of combined experience.
“It doesn’t come about by chance,” he says. “It’s about being highly disciplined in what you do. While the banking sector is suffering more retrenchment, growing dissatisfaction and greater regulatory pressures, we’ve maintained the kind of global outlook that you need to be successful in this business.”
The skillset and the infrastructure that sets SC Lowy apart from all of its competitors means that the potential for growth, both in Europe and in Asia, remains substantial. The beach is still beckoning, but the opportunity for SC Lowy is such that Peter has given up on retiring for now.
David Beckett
HEAD OF SOURCING
SC LOWY
David has over 15 years’ experience within the restructuring and corporate finance markets, both as an advisor and investment professional. He has led SC Lowy’s sourcing capabilities since inception in 2009.
In 2014, David relocated from Head Office in Hong Kong to London to lead the expansion of SC Lowy’s European business, designed to replicate the proven model of providing value and liquidity options in the region.
David is a Qualified Chartered Accountant (ICAEW) and holds a BA (Hons) in Economics.
David Beckett
HEAD OF SOURCING
SC LOWY
David Beckett, one of the firm’s first employees, joined SC Lowy as a sourcing and origination specialist and now runs that function globally. He has since transferred to London in 2014 and is now also in charge of the firm’s expansion into Europe.
Having solidified the firm’s reputation among bank clients in Asia Pacific as an independent institution that can act as principal, can execute well and has the research capability to add value to clients, David is now following these relationships into Europe to replicate SC Lowy’s successful Asia-Pacific model.
He draws on considerable experience. David started his career at PwC and soon progressed to the restructuring team, where he advised banks on distressed situations, which included a broad variety of work, from the landmark $6.2 billion restructuring of Marconi’s debts and administration of Enron, to mid-market deals such as a portfolio of burger joints and the crane-hire business that erected the London Eye.
That led to an entrepreneurial opportunity in China, where he leveraged his contacts to advise up-and-coming businesses in the mainland and raise capital for them from hedge funds and private equity firms.
At SC Lowy, he is able to offer clients both: specialist advisory expertise on debt, plus the balance sheet flexibility to take positions on.
The success of this approach was exemplified by David’s sourcing of Billabong debt in Australia. Having spent two years tracking the credit and a great deal of time exchanging views with the lenders, SC Lowy was in pole position to provide liquidity when it was needed.
That was ultimately the choice made by all the banks in the syndicated facility, but it is an important aspect of David’s relationship-driven style that this price-discovery work is not contingent on selling a position.
As David puts it: “It is important for lenders to understand their liquidity options so they can make rational decisions. Banks like working with SC Lowy as we have a unique combination of expertise, discretion and balance sheet to provide that option on a confidential basis.”
Since arriving in London, David has confirmed that this proposition is just as relevant in Europe, where there are no other independent players with significant balance sheet and the market’s traditional liquidity providers are constrained by increasing regulation.
Indeed, this was also his experience in the Middle East, where he helped SC Lowy to become the leading player in secondary loan trading. In essence, it is a simple model: add value for clients and they will call you first.
Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of his family. David’s wife, herself a successful finance lawyer, has twice embraced his decision to join a start-up, and backed this big move from Hong Kong to London, with three children and a dog, as he pursues his role to build SC Lowy’s European business.
The opportunity is clearly a tremendous one and they have settled well to life back in their home country. David will visit Head Office regularly, and try to coincide his trips with the annual Hong Kong Rugby Sevens – an iconic event which he attended every year and along with his son, became the unsuspected faces of the 2014 event.
Mihir Chandra
HEAD ANALYST
SC LOWY
Mihir has over 10 years of experience in capital markets, including restructuring, M&A, leveraged finance and debt capital markets.
Previously, Mihir was working with Deutsche Bank and One East Partners in New York.
Mihir graduated Magna Cum Laude from University of Michigan with a BS in Economics and Financial Mathematics.
Mihir Chandra
Head of Research, Asia Pacific
As Head of Research in Asia Pacific, one of Mihir’s most important jobs is to generate the ideas that are SC Lowy’s hallmark, making sure the firm and its clients stay ahead of the curve by accurately forecasting market trends and anticipating opportunities. “That’s how you make money consistently,” he says.
While his day-to-day responsibility is analysing companies, this entrepreneurial mindset led him to build and expand SC Lowy’s coverage in the Middle East. Starting from scratch, Mihir’s ability to quickly grasp an understanding of the situations, the players and the assets, not to mention the legal framework, has helped turn SC Lowy into the dominant player in this market.
India, his home market, has also become a focus as he sees growing opportunities there.
Like the rest of the senior team at SC Lowy, Mihir has a deeply analytical background. Having studied financial mathematics, economics and statistics at The University of Michigan, his first job was in the FIG team at Wachovia where he focused on middle-market lending companies, and was exposed to a high volume of work and got a strong grounding in the basics.
But he attributes much of his skillset to the analytical and detail-focused M&A and leveraged finance work he did as a post-dotcom TMT banker at Deutsche Bank in New York. During the boom in leveraged buyouts he worked on deals such as Clear Channel and Bell Canada Enterprises.
Eager to put his skills to the test on the buyside, Mihir joined an exciting new hedge fund, One East Partners, at precisely the market peak, in 2007, by which time the fund was managing just under $2 billion. During the first week he saw a trading screen that showed a $100 million loss on the firm’s equity positions. “I thought I was going to have a heart attack.”
One East survived that scare, but the crisis was a tough experience for the fund, especially after a high-level decision to transition into credit and bring down the gates on its investors, but the experience gave him a ringside seat for the biggest distressed market in living memory. With most of the team gone, he was intensely involved in a variety of credit situations in the US and Europe, often as part of the creditors’ committee, working alongside the founders to successfully exploit the market rebound.
After that experience, intellectual curiosity drew Mihir back to Asia, where SC Lowy offered the opportunity to bring his broad experience to bear in a new and exciting market.
There have been some sacrifices along the way. As a junior, Mihir played golf at the national level in India, but since then has spent the bulk of his time in New York and Hong Kong — great places to learn about economics and finance, but not the world’s best golf cities. Getting back to scratch will have to wait for retirement.
Florian Schmidt
HEAD OF DEBT CAPITAL MARKETS
SC LOWY
Florian joined SC Lowy in February 2015 as Head of Debt Capital Markets. Florian is a veteran of Asia’s debt markets, having served the industry for more than 20 years. During this time, he has originated and executed numerous bond issues including several landmark and award-winning high-yield bond offerings, notably debut transactions for Vingroup (Vietnam,) Mongolian Mining Corp (Mongolia), eAccess (Japan), Bukit Makmur Mandiri Utama (Indonesia) and Indika Energy (Indonesia).
Prior to joining SC Lowy, Florian worked with ING, Bank of America and HSBC, having started his career with Deutsche Bank. He holds an MBA degree from Westfälische Wilhelms–Universität Münster.
Florian is the author of acclaimed reference book “A Guide to Asian High Yield Bonds – Financing Growth Enterprises” published by Wiley in 2008 and second edition in 2014.
Florian Schmidt
HEAD OF DEBT CAPITAL MARKETS
Florian runs SC Lowy’s debt capital markets unit, having joined in 2015 to set up the desk and build the firm’s presence.
The establishment of a dedicated primary operation was a natural evolution from the firm’s strong and growing presence in secondary debt trading, combined with its research-driven approach and strong balance sheet. As a bookrunner on capital markets transactions, the firm can help new and existing clients manage their capital structure.
With more than 20 years of experience in the region’s financial markets, Florian literally wrote the book on Asian high-yield bonds — first published in 2008 as A Guide to Asian High Yield Bonds. He has drawn on his experience to build a specialist team at SC Lowy that offers full service across public high-yield bond offers, private placements, liability management, open-market repurchases, tender offers, exchange offers, distressed exchanges and advisory.
Florian has a track record of building businesses. He came to Asia in the early 1990s as part of a small Deutsche Bank corporate finance team that was then exploring the idea of expanding into the region and subsequently helped to open new markets and establish pioneering businesses at Nomura, HSBC, Bank of America and, most recently, ING, where he was head of high-yield debt capital markets.
Along the way, the teams he has worked for and led have been responsible for numerous award-winning transactions, including the first public corporate high-yield bonds out of Japan, Mongolia and Vietnam, as well as the first holdco deal out of Indonesia since the Asian financial crisis.
At a time when many bulge-bracket banks are reducing high-yield exposure and trading for regulatory reasons or to optimise their risk-weighted assets, SC Lowy offers a rare opportunity to once again build a business that can compete to climb the DCM league tables and win awards for innovative and client-focused transactions.
In addition to his passion for high-yield bonds, Florian has had a lifelong interest in steam engines. Indeed, it was this enthusiasm that first drew him to Asia, having travelled to China as a student on the Trans-Siberian railway in the 1980s. After a journey that passed through Berlin, Moscow and Irkutsk, he eventually arrived in China’s north eastern provinces (“Dongbei”), where he spent six weeks taking photographs of the region’s locomotives.
However, the passing of time has forced him to consider hanging up his anorak, as all but a handful of the region’s once-abundant steam engines have been retired. Ironically, there are now more working narrow-gauge lines in his native Germany than in Asia. Thankfully, Asian high-yield bond issuers are not an endangered species.
Steve Lyons
CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER & GENERAL COUNSEL
SC LOWY
Steve Lyons joined SC Lowy in 2010 and oversees all operations and risk assurance. Steve has over 15 years of legal, operations and transaction experience, including nine years in the banking and project finance group of a leading law firm.
Steve holds a JD and MBA from Georgetown University and a BA from Stanford University.
Steve Lyons
CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER & GENERAL COUNSEL
Steve runs legal and operations for SC Lowy. He is responsible for sorting through the documentation on all the loans and trade claims the firm is transacting, as well as making sure that trades settle. On the operations side, among a variety of other duties, he ushers bonds through the electronic settlement process.
Originally from the west coast of the US, Steve attended Stanford University for his undergraduate degree. However, still keen to study at a “brick and ivy” institution, he ended up at Georgetown University on the east coast. After earning a JD and MBA, he worked for a law firm in Manhattan.
While the quality of deals in New York was excellent and the work was intellectually stimulating, he jumped at the opportunity to move even further east to Hong Kong.
He came to Asia as a project finance lawyer with Clifford Chance in 2002, keen to broaden his horizons after working in New York. But he was never destined to spend his entire career at a law firm. In common with many of the senior figures at SC Lowy, Steve had an entrepreneurial itch to scratch — and also wanted “to do something positive for the world”.
These twin ambitions led him into the renewable energy sector, where he launched his own business developing wind farms in China. He succeeded, along with a small group of others, in getting a project up and running in Inner Mongolia, but the effects of the global financial crisis and the failure to renew the Kyoto protocol created extremely challenging conditions.
With the market for Chinese wind farms in the doldrums, Steve took up another entrepreneurial opportunity by joining SC Lowy in its early days, initially running legal and eventually taking over operations as well.
There are no more wind farms in his plans, but he is still committed to making a positive difference in the world, which led him to Nepal with Michel Lowy to run a 100-kilometre race to raise money for EMPower, a charity run by finance professionals who made their living in the emerging markets, and for which SC Lowy now sits on the board.
His passion for triathlons and trail running has seen him compete in five Ironman races during his time in Hong Kong. When not at work or on the trails, he spends his time with his wife and their four children.
