On Aug. 31, Phil Tseng left the role of chief executive at BlackRock TCP Capital Corp., the publicly traded private-lending vehicle, and a Friday filing says he will leave BlackRock on Oct. 1. Jason Mehring, a BlackRock executive working on the fund, has taken over as CEO, and Dan Worrell has been named president. In July, Bloomberg News said Tseng had been preparing his exit for an extended period. Separately, Bloomberg reported in May that federal prosecutors in Manhattan sought information about TCPC's valuation practices.
After a stretch of steep markdowns and questions over valuations, BlackRock took substantial steps last month to refocus the fund. Among the moves was an agreement to move $523 million of loans into a Pantheon-backed vehicle, a secondaries specialist. The fund also brought on Keefe, Bruyette & Woods as advisers and initiated a process to solicit bids for the portfolio's remaining $671 million in loans.
TCPC ranks among BlackRock's older private-credit strategies, tracing back to the 2018 purchase of Tennenbaum Capital Partners, and accounts for only a small piece of BlackRock's $15.3 trillion in assets. Even so, the firm has accelerated its private-credit push in recent years, paying about $12 billion for HPS Investment Partners last year.
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This year, TCPC reduced the net value of its assets on two occasions, by 19% in January and by another 5% in May. The stock has slid about 26% through Thursday's close, a larger drop than the roughly 9% decline in the S&P BDC Index. It is a real-time reminder that concentrated credit funds can behave very differently from broader baskets, especially when loan marks and liquidity come under stress.
