Intersting view into how Apollo wore four hats on the same deal:

One sentence: Apollo built the portfolio, broke it, collected fees while it broke, then bought the wreckage from the entity they partially own — and nobody had to disclose the price.

The setup: Athora (European insurer, ~25% owned by Apollo) needed yield, so in 2018 they built a €1.1B portfolio of German office buildings, wrapped in a Luxembourg fund called Hemingway.

The conflict: Apollo simultaneously was:

1. Advising Athora on what to buy

2. Sitting on Hemingway's board approving those buys

3. Collecting property management fees through their firm Oxenwood

4. Positioned to take over the assets if things went south

Things went south. German offices got crushed post-COVID. The portfolio started deteriorating. Apollo kept collecting fees through the whole decline.

The escape hatch: Rather than take years of ugly writedowns that would trash Athora's capital ratios quarter after quarter, they used an accounting rule (IFRS 10) creatively. They swapped in an Apollo-controlled entity as General Partner, which technically triggered "loss of control" — letting Athora wipe the whole €1.1B off its balance sheet in one shot and absorb the loss cleanly.

The punchline: Apollo now controls the distressed workout. They had more information about this portfolio than anyone. Nobody disclosed what they paid for that control. Fourteen months later Athora goes to market and raises €750M in debt, presenting clean capital metrics — with the Hemingway disaster buried in the footnotes in accounting language.