From: Ike Groff To: "Lesley Groff MININ=It" <MMII=IM> Subject: FW: Colony Capital Date: Wed, 06 Apr 2011 12:20:31 +0000 From: Will Ford [mailto: Sent: Wednesday, April 06, 2011 8:16 AM To: Ike Groff; Neal Shah Subject: Colony Capital The New York Times (The New York Times Company) - Clipping Loc. 1747-1808 I Added on Wednesday, April 06, 2011, 07:56 AM Colony Capital Persists in Betting on the Middle East Jonathan Alcorn/Bloomberg News Thomas J. Barrack Jr. of Colony Capital said regime change can yield favorable returns. By JULIE CRESWELL When it comes to investing in the Middle East, Thomas J. Barrack Jr. takes the long view. Very long. Instability is nothing new in the region, he said. It's been that way for 5,000 years. "The Middle East is printing money and it's used to operating in chaos," said Mr. Barrack, who runs Colony Capital, which controls $36 billion in private equity and real estate investments around the globe, including more than $200 million in the Arab world. "In fact, it tends to do better in times of chaos than it does in times of peace. Regime changes are just a fact of life." While other private equity investors back away from the area, Mr. Barrack said he was "looking hard" at adding to his holdings there, which include hotels in Cairo and Bahrain, and grocery stores in Syria. "Even though the West is thinking that this is a once-in-a-civilization kind of event, these events have taken place many times," he said. "The time to buy is when everybody else is running for the hills." Indeed, executives at the private equity giant Carlyle Group, which is partly owned by the Abu Dhabi investment firm Mubadala Development and raised a $500 million fund to make Middle East investments in 2009, said they were suspending some of their investment plans in Egypt. A Carlyle co- founder, David Rubenstein, warned in a speech last month that while his firm was not rushing for the exits, "today isn't the day to do an investment in Egy