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Warburg Pincus Is Considering $3 Billion Navitas Midstream Sale

Warburg Pincus Is Considering $3 Billion Navitas Midstream Sale

(Bloomberg) -- Buyout firm Warburg Pincus is considering a $3 billion sale of natural gas pipeline and processing company Navitas Midstream Partners LLC, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Navitas has hired investment bank Jefferies Financial Group Inc. to run an auction process, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The company, which is attracting interest from other private equity firms as well as infrastructure investors, could be sold before the end of the year, the people said.

No agreement has been reached and it’s possible Warburg may keep the company.

A representative for Navitas didn’t respond to a request for comment. Representatives for Jefferies and Warburg declined to comment.

Warburg led a $500 million line-of-equity commitment to Navitas and its management team, led by Bruce Northcutt, in 2014, according to the company’s website. Northcutt had previously been chief executive officer and president of Copano Energy LLC, a publicly traded gas distributor that was sold to Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LP in 2013 for about $5 billion, including debt, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Navitas acquired gas gathering and processing assets in Texas from both DCP Midstream LLC and Apache Corp. in 2015, it said in statements at the time.

Navitas, based in The Woodlands, Texas, has more than 1,600 miles of gas gathering pipelines, as well as cryogenic gas processing facilities. The company has begun construction of a new processing plant in Glasscock County near Midland, Texas.

To contact the reporters on this story: Kiel Porter in New York at kporter17@bloomberg.net;Gillian Tan in New York at gtan129@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Elizabeth Fournier at efournier5@bloomberg.net, ;Alan Goldstein at agoldstein5@bloomberg.net, Michael Hytha, Matthew Monks

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