LONDON — A little over a decade ago, Four Seasons Health Care was among the largest long-term care home companies in Britain, operating 500 sites with 20,000 residents and more than 60 specialist centers. Domestic and global private equity investors had supercharged the company’s growth, betting that the rising needs of aging Britons would yield big returns.
Within weeks, the Four Seasons brand may be finished.
Christie & Co., a commercial real estate broker, splashed a summer sale across its website that signaled the demise: The last 111 Four Seasons facilities in England, Scotland, and Jersey were on the market. Already sold were its 29 homes in Northern Ireland.
Four Seasons collapsed after years of private equity investors rolling in one after another to buy its business, sell its real estate, and at times wrest multimillion-dollar profits through complex debt schemes — until the last big equity fund, Terra Firma, which in 2012 paid about $1.3 billion for the company, was caught short.
In a country where government health care is a right, the Four Seasons story exemplifies the high-stakes rise — and, ultimately, fall — of private equity investment in health and social services. Hanging over society’s most vulnerable patients, these heavily leveraged deals failed to account for the cost of their care. Private equity firms …