Michael E Kalogris

Mr. Kalogris, 63, in 2008 co-founded Arete Capital Parners, a private investment company that functions as an operating partner of the New York based equity firm Catalyst Investors. He is managing partner of Arete. He was chairman & CEO of SunCom Wireless, a wireless carrier which had operated in the southeastern United States since 1999, and in parts of the Caribbean since 2004. Founded in January 1999 as Triton PCS Holdings, Triton changed its name to SunCom in 2005. Based in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, SunCom went through several deals with other major cellular carriers. Before it was finally acquired by T-Mobile for $1.6 billion in cash and $800 million in assumed debt in February 2008, SunCom provided digital wireless communications services to more than 1.1 million subscribers. Mr. Kalogris has a long history in the “buy it, build it, sell it” business. In November 1999, he reached an agreement with Rural Cellular Corporation, which purchased portions of Triton’s assets for $1.24 billion in early 2000 (Verizon eventually acquired Rural for $2.66 billion in cash and assumed debt in August 2007). He also built out Tri- ton’s network with Cingular Wireless in 2004 before changing Triton’s name to SunCom and ultimately selling SunCom to T- Mobile. He still lives outside Philadelphia with his wife of many years (his high school sweetheart), with whom he has two children. Besides Mr. Kalogris’ reputation of making money for his investors, it was a deal with AT&T in the 1990s which attracted investors. In exchange for a small equity stake, AT&T gave Triton licenses covering 11 million people in areas contiguous with AT&T’s territories in the southeast. Mr. Kalogris earned his MBA at Columbia University Business School in 1982. After working at IBM for a spell, he entered the telecommunications business by taking a job with a Philadelphia- based outfit called Metrophone, helping to build it into a $1.1 billion cellular company in Philadelphia and its suburbs before its owners sold Metrophone to Comcast in 1991. Mr. Kalogris had no equity in Metrophone, so he left to build Horizon to operate mostly in suburban Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. Five years later, Horizon was sold in a series of deals for the $575 million, but Mr. Kalogris and his fellow managers got to share just $10 million of that among them. This only made him determined to get more of the action, so he found backers in J.P. Morgan, Chase Capital Partners and Desai Capital Management to give him 10 percent of Triton as compensation for running the deal. The money flowed in: Even before the bonds were placed, Mr. Kalogris got a $425 million bank revolver loan and $140 million in equity commitments.