Warren Buffett’s distrust of investment bankers is no secret—he once characterized Wall Streeters are “nearsighted and self-serving” in an annual letter as noted by the New York Times.
But one banker has won over Buffett: Byron Trott, a former Goldman Sachs banker who now runs BDT Capital Partners who the Oracle of Omaha once called the “rare investment banker that puts himself in his client’s shoes.”
Apparently the board of directors over at Mars felt the same way. The candy company hired BDT and Morgan Stanley to help it buy animal-hospital chain VCA for about $7.7 billion, debt not included, on Monday.
Read More: Fortune’s 2014 profile of Trott, The Billionaires’ Banker.
It’s not the first time Mars has worked with Trott. BDT, which lists names including Koch and Pritzker among its clients, previously brokered a $23 billion deal for Mars to buy chewing gum giant Wrigley in 2008. Both were Trott’s clients at the time.
“He was basically on every side of the transaction,” William “Beau” Wrigley Jr., then the chairman and CEO of Wrigley and today an adviser to BDT, told Fortune in 2014. “We knew he was working with Mars as well, and our board signed off on that. We had a trust factor for 10 years.”
BDT and Morgan Stanley are expected to split roughly $30 million to $35 million in fees on the Mars-VCA deal, according to Freeman and Co. as first reported by Business Insider.
