Madison Dearborn Partners

History of private equity and venture capital
Early history
(origins of modern private equity)
The 1980s
(leveraged buyout boom)
The 1990s
(leveraged buyout and the venture capital bubble)
The 2000s
(dot-com bubble to the credit crunch)
The 2010s
(expansion)
The 2020s
(COVID-19 recession)

In 1998, the firm bought Reiman Publications, based in Greendale, Wisconsin, from Roy Reiman for $640 million. In 2002, the firm sold Reiman Publications to Reader's Digest Association.[7]

In 2007, the firm joined with Michael Eisner's Tornante investment company to buy out baseball card maker The Topps Company.[8]

Madison Dearborn completed leveraged buyout transactions for a number of publicly traded and other significant companies in 2006 and 2007 including:

• Asurion
• CDW[9]
• LA Fitness
• Nuveen investments;[10] in 2014, a plan for MDP to sell Nuveen to TIAA-CREF for $6.25 billion was announced;[11] while the Wall Street Journal cited an anonymous source close to the transaction to the effect that MDP "will have broken even on the transaction", Felix Salmon queried that assertion at Reuters;[12] Dan Primack at Fortune then published additional information about auxiliary benefits to MDP to buttress the break-even claim.[13]
• Sorenson Communications
• Univision Communications[14]
• VWR International
• Yankee Candle[15]

On June 30, 2007, Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE) announced that the company entered into a definitive agreement for BCE to be acquired pursuant to a plan of arrangement by an investor group led by Teachers Private Capital, the private investment arm of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, Providence Equity Partners Inc. and Madison Dearborn Partners. The all-cash transaction was valued at C$51.7billion (US$48.5 billion), including C$16.9 billion (US$15.9 billion) of debt, preferred equity and minority interests. The arrangement was approved on September 21, 2007, at a special meeting of shareholders by more than 97% of the votes cast by holders of common and preferred shares, voting as a single class.[16]

MDP invests through a series of private limited partnerships and its investors include a variety of pension funds, endowments and other institutional investors: