View or download a PDF of the full report here.

Open Gate Capital
The Private Equity Stakeholder Project
Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund

In 2017, OpenGate Capital, a Los Angeles-based private equity firm bought HUFCOR, which manufactures portable room partitions for hotels and convention centers and has been operating in Janesville, Wisconsin for 120 years. 

Four years later, in June 2021, OpenGate announced that it would close the Janesville factory and shift its operations to Mexico, permanently lay- ing off 166 workers, many of whom have spent their entire adult lives working for the company.

HUFCOR is just the latest casualty in OpenGate’s history of buying viable businesses and then run- ning those companies into the ground, throwing employees out of work, sometimes without advance notice, and harming communities.

In a span of less than four years, OpenGate Capital ran at least five companies out of business, putting more than 1,300 U.S. workers out of their jobs. HUFCOR would be the third Wisconsin plant that Hufcor has closed in the last ten years. 

While OpenGate’s actions have left workers jobless and creditors angry, the private equity firm has done extremely well for itself, claiming to have generated annual returns of 18% and 37% respectively for its first and second funds. 2 Even as OpenGate drove companies into bankruptcy closed plants, it extracted fees and dividends for its own benefit. 

OpenGate Capital is a private equity firm that was founded in 2005 by Andrew Nikou. It is based in Los Angeles and has an additional office in Paris, France. It has $1.1 billion assets Under Management and focuses on the acquisition of lower-to-mid market businesses in the industrial, business services, and technology sectors.