https://opencorporates.com/companies/gb/OC325502

The private equity firm that Vaughan-Smith would form to lead this venture, SilverStreet Capital, was set up in the UK. Its maiden fund, Silverlands Fund, closed in 2012 with US$214 million, almost half of this coming from Danish pension funds.55 The rest was supplied by development banks, like the CDC Group of the UK, OPIC of the US, FinnFund of Finland and the IFU of Denmark. OPIC and the World Bank’s MIGA also chipped in with political risk insurance to cover the fund’s investments. The fund’s business model is pretty simple. It aims to bring Western industrial agribusiness to Africa by running its own large-scale farms, organising contract production with local farmers and selling hybrid seeds and chicks to farms in countries like Zambia and Tanzania. It does this through numerous subsidiaries, most of which are fully owned by the fund. With so many development banks on board, SilverStreet is highly sensitive to accusations of land grabs and each year it publishes "impact and ESG” reports that are full of examples of how the fund is benefiting Africans. But one can question how much of the capital “invested” in Silverlands is truly making it to the African continent and staying there. The investors who signed up to the Silverlands Fund, registered in the tax haven of Luxembourg, agreed to pay Vaughan-Smith's firm an annual 2% management fee on the total commitments to the fund, or roughly US$4-5 million every year.56 This means that over the fund's lifespan of 10 years, the fund managers will take US$40-50 million from the total pot, allegedly to pay overhead costs, due diligence expenses and monitoring. The African portfolio companies may be a source of additional fees for the fund managers. For instance, the Silverlands Fund is invested in a South African-based company for which Vaughan-Smith sits on the board. In 2019, that company paid him personally over US$14,000 in fees, while another SilverStreet manager who also sits on the board received nearly US$17,000.57 It is difficult to asses how much Vaughan-Smith and his partners make from such fees because the operations are run through numerous companies, most of them offshore. The management fee payouts, for instance, go to the Luxembourg company SilverStreet Management, which is the general partner of the Silverlands Fund. It then pays "advisory fees" to two other companies: one called SilverStreet Capital Agricultural Advisors for which there is no public information because it is based in the opaque tax haven of Guernsey and another called SilverStreet Capital LLP, which is based in London. This latter company is at least 75% owned by Vaughan-Smith, and also lists his wife as a director.58 The Silverlands Fund targeted a net internal rate of return in the mid-teens, according to a recent company presentation.59 With 17% of the profits going to Vaughan-Smith’s firm as a performance fee, and without having put more than a few thousand dollars of their own in the fund’s starting capital, the general partners stand to walk away with perhaps US$100 million or more.60 By contrast, the firm says it increased farmers’ incomes on average by about US$330 per year.61 (https://grain.org/en/article/6533-barbarians-at-the-barn-private-equity-sinks-its-teeth-into-agriculture)