The Plundering Oligarch You Haven’t Heard Of

For such a busy bee, the private-equity oligarch Jeffrey Leerink has really managed to fly under the radar. No major media outlet in the Boston area, where he operates, has seriously investigated his role in any number of headline-grabbing scandals. You’ve probably never even heard of him, but he was a key player in the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and the financing of the now-bankrupt for-profit hospital system Steward Health Care. Now he’s hard at work trying to expand an ecologically disastrous private-jet airport.

In 2019, Leerink sold his private investment bank, Leerink Partners, to the infamous SVB for $280 million and stayed on to manage the bank’s securities arm. The rest is history: SVB’s March 2023 collapse and subsequent federal seizure was the largest bank failure since the 2008 economic meltdown. The whole sordid affair was a textbook example of a disaster that could have been averted had Congress not capitulated to the bankers that lobbied for deregulation.

As Leerink leaped from the sinking SVB ship, reestablishing Leerink Partners, he plundered from the fields of life sciences and healthcare. He handled financing for Steward Health Care, cofounded by the oligarch Ralph de la Torre. A cardiac surgeon, de la Torre was formerly CEO of Caritas Christi, a nonprofit hospital network of six acute-care facilities in eastern Massachusetts owned by the Archdiocese of Boston. In 2010, he brought in the private-equity fund Cerberus Capital to acquire the hospital network for $246 million and convert it to a for-profit system.

Read the full article on The Nation.