Citizens Bank provided debt financing to SK Capital in the company’s majority interest acquisition of Lacerta, a designer and manufacturer of thermoformed packaging solutions.
SK Capital Partners is a New York-based private investment firm focused on the specialty materials, chemicals and pharmaceuticals sectors.
Latham & Watkins acted as legal counsel to SK Capital and Citizens M&A Advisory acted as exclusive financial advisor to Lacerta.
Lacerta’s co-founders, Ali and Mory Lotfi, will continue to retain a significant ownership stake in the company. Terms of the deal were not announced.
“Ali, Mory and the Lacerta team have built an exceptional business with a best-in-class reputation for customer service, innovation and sustainable products,” Jack Norris, managing director of SK Capital, said. “We look forward to partnering with Ali and Mory to support the continuation of Lacerta’s extraordinary growth. Our mutual focus is on preserving Lacerta’s customer-centric approach, which is highly differentiated in the market, while at the same time putting in place the required systems, processes and capabilities that will enable the company to scale alongside its expanding customer base.”
“Today marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter for Lacerta,” Ali Lotfi, president of Lacerta, said. “We chose to partner with SK Capital given its track record of successfully supporting the growth and improvement of family-owned businesses and the fit between our needs and SK’s capabilities. Our organizations share the same core values and long-term orientation that have been a hallmark of Lacerta’s success to date. We are aligned in our vision to build Lacerta into a world-class packaging solutions provider.”
“We view Lacerta as a platform that can be grown in a multitude of ways to serve a wider range of its customers’ requirements. We’re especially excited about the opportunity Lacerta has to enable its customers to meet their internal sustainability targets by utilizing packaging that’s fully recyclable and incorporating recycled content at increasingly higher levels,” Dave Mezzanotte, senior director at SK Capital, said.
