Corporate Blawg's great Aunt was an angel. She was renowned for her generosity of spirit, her honesty and lack of any prejudice or impatience whatsoever. Auntie Elsie worked as a blue-stocking Matron in the Lake District. She hardly rested through two major wars, never marrying, but dedicating her life to those she could help (rumour has it she always longed for a young soldier who had been killed in action). This unsung angel, now no longer in flesh amoungst us, never once, as far as Corporate Blawg is aware, invested in technology businesses in their infant stages to reap huge dividends and buy dangerous sports cars and fat cigars.
Perhaps she missed out? I guess I'll be able to ask her after I push St Peter into a ditch and climb over the pearly gates.
Angels, we love them, whether as young individuals for our oldest blood, or as young businesses for our richest investors. We've all seen pictures of angels - in the Last Judgement of the Sistene Chapel, and we all know (or knew) one or two earth-angels who pulled us away from that careering vehicle (or other metaphorical disaster); yet few of us know of the allegorical angel spoken of so highly in centres of capitalist paradise. Corporate Blawg has therefore taken a few moments to set out a few key terms, and the impact should be implicit:
A business angel is an angel investor who is usally an entrepreneur or wealthy investor. The usual pickings for an angel investor are young nubile companies with a great potential to grow and flourish, like e-businesses and technological devlopments. Capital raised from a number of angel investors is known as angel financing, or seed financing. This usually involves much greater sums than a single angel can amount. Then you have Angel groups, which are organisations, funds or networks specifically set up for facilitating angel investments.
As a rather cool term of the CV, an archangel is an outsider hired by an angel group to carry out due diligence exercises and to coordinate investment duties to the members of the angel group. Archangels usually have no financial commitment to the group.
Back on the ground, or even the gutter, fallen angels are former investment-grade corporate borrowers that have been downgraded by the FSA. Some of these villains have issued debt instruments with poor credit. Such dodgy instruments tend to be traded in the high-yield market, where liquidity tends to be lower. The FSA warns that this can create risks for investors and financial institutions that have limited experience of dealing in illiquid instruments.
All in all, Corporate Blawg adores angels, as clients, as concepts and, most importantly, as creatures of compassion. Corporate Blawg wishes to perpetuate the notion of sharing and co-operation so, somewhat contrary to his strict rules of anonymity, Corporate Blawg has notified his trainee of the existance of his blog in order that his trainee may avoid having to do tiresome research on basic concepts. Corporate Blawg hopes that this blog is also serving a similar use to others on the intraweb. Corporate Blawg would like to hear from those who have read this blawg, together with your suggestions of how Corporate Blawg could make it better. Corporate Blawg's corporate law blog does not aim to rant, it aims to please.
Comments