John Chiang, the treasurer of California, recently called for legislation requiring full transparency in the reporting of fees charged by private-equity firms, the New York Times DealBook reported on Saturday. In an Oct. 12 letter to the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and California State Teachers’ Retirement System, Chiang urged both organizations to help him devise legislation to solve the problem of investors who “pay excessive fees to private-equity firms and do not have sufficient visibility into the nature and amount of those fees.” Giants like Blackstone, TPG and the Carlyle Group have said that disclosing their agreements with investors would reveal trade secrets. Pension funds investing in these deals also refuse to disclose relevant documents, saying that private-equity firms would bar them from future deals if they did so.
