PLACE PARTNERS GROUP - Key Persons


David Kelley

Job Titles:
  • Senior Advisor
  • Senior Advisor to PPG
David Kelley is a Senior Advisor to PPG. From 1985 to 1988, Mr. Kelley was a tax lawyer in the law firm of Brown and Wood (merged into Sidley Austin LLP) located in New York. From 1988 to 1991, Mr. Kelley worked at Merrill Lynch in New York, where he was promoted to a Director of the Global Swap Group. From 1991 to 1994, Mr. Kelley was a Managing Director at UBS Securities in New York, in charge of the U.S. Structured Products Group. From 1994 to 1998, he was a Managing Director and Head of the Global Structured Products Group at Deutsche Bank Securities in New York. Mr. Kelley was a Managing Director of Integrated Capital Associates, a private equity firm located in New York from 1998 to 2006. From 2006 until the present, Mr. Kelley has run private equity operations through various investment vehicles. He and his partners have invested in a number of asset classes including global commercial real estate, insurance and reinsurance companies, and U.S. defense contractors. Mr. Kelley graduated from Emory University with a B.A. in 1979. He graduated with a J.D. degree from Temple University School of Law in 1983 and received an L.L.M. in Taxation from New York University School of Law in 1985.

David Place - CEO, Founder

Job Titles:
  • Chief Executive Officer
  • Founder
David Place is the Founder and CEO of Place Partners Group. He has over 30 years of tax and transaction structuring experience working with large institutional investors, hedge funds, and private equity. He has been focused on Brazilian finance projects with Agrinlog for the last five years, serving as Head, Corporate Finance for the last three years. In this role, Mr. Place has been structuring multi-party and multi-jurisdictional asset-backed financing transactions. Prior to joining Agrinlog, Mr. Place worked as a Managing Director at Griffin Financial Group (2009 to 2013) developing the insurance linked securities platform and working with global insurance companies on credit enhancement transactions targeting complex business structures. Mr. Place was a Managing Partner at Risk Capital Partners from 2006 to 2009 (structuring group), and from 2005 to 2006, David was a co-founder, principal, and CFO of the registered investment advisor Mill Creek Capital Advisors. From 1999 to 2005, Mr. Place was a Partner with Tax Counselors of Bryn Mawr LLC. In that role, Mr. Place worked primarily with the firm's 300 tax clients (private equity groups, hedge funds, and individual investors) in structuring tax efficient monetization and hedging transactions. Mr. Place also spent six years as a Manager and Senior Manager with PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (1993 to 1999). Prior to PwC, Mr. Place worked with the large law firm Quarles & Brady in Milwaukee. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a B.A. in 1984 and received his J.D. from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1987.

FRANCISCO AVILA FILHO - Managing Director

Job Titles:
  • Managing Director
  • Managing Director of PPG
Francisco Avila is a Managing Director of PPG. He has more than 40 years of experience in management positions in the Brazilian banking sector (specialist in credit management). Mr. Avila has worked as an Executive in major Brazilian financial entities such as Banco Itaú, Banco Bradesco, Banco Excel Econômico and Serasa. He has spent the last six years working and developing credit programs as a Founder, Partner and CEO of Agrinlog Brasil Investimentos S.A. Over the years, Mr. Avila has also been a credit consultant/instructor for large financial corporations. For more than 20 years he participated in the Credit and Risk Committee of FEBRABAN where he was Coordinator. Mr. Avila was responsible for the development and launch of the Central Bank of the SCR Central Risk System, credit rating of operations to form the Bank PDD (provision for credit losses). He wrote the book ADVANCED ANALYSIS OF CREDIT and is the co-author of the Manual of the Policy and Decisional Process of Credit and the Manual of Credit for the granting of loans to individuals and small businesses. He has a Master's degree in Finance from PUC - SP.