The firm, which manages $16 billion worldwide, has spent $300,000 developing a Web site that tells its story in more than 1,500 pages, providing details on portfolio companies; biographies of 270 investment professionals; and FAQs addressing the roles played by fund advisers that include former U.S. president George Bush, former U.S. secretary of State James Baker and former U.K. prime minister John Major. “The biggest myth is that Carlyle is able to attract deals by virtue of our access rather than our investment due diligence,” says Carlyle co-founder Daniel D’Aniello. “Our high-profile people have virtually no impact on our investment process.”
Washington-based Carlyle had long been contemplating the Web project but accelerated it after September 11, 2001, when a $2 million Carlyle fund investment by the estranged family of Osama bin Laden made the news. (The money was subsequently returned.) Though the site wasn’t officially launched until May of this year, the timing was propitious: In April, John Wiley & Sons published The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group, in which author Dan Briody portrayed the firm as the embodiment of the military-industrial complex. (For the record, the Carlyle site says that only 13 percent of the investment portfolio is in aerospace and defense. The firm is most active in real estate and media.) Carlyle may have more record-straightening to do next year, when Michael Moore, director of the Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine, plans to release Fahrenheit 911, a documentary exploring alleged linkages among Carlyle, Osama bin Laden and the two presidents Bush.
Carlyle’s openness has its limits: Contrary to persistent rumors, the firm has no plans to make a public stock offering, asserts D’Aniello, who served as Marriott Corp.'s vice president for finance and development before Carlyle’s formation in 1987. “It’s not an active idea,” he says. “We were never seriously pursuing it.”
