BUR, page-9

I suspect the decline in capitalisation of wages has to do with the aggressive overhead growth IMF has undertaken in the last 2 years, but i don't know for a certainty. They can only capitalize wage expenses where those wages are directly attributable to the underlying cases, so it could be that IMF has a small team internally who work on cases and they capitalise their wages, but all the expensive hiring they've done in the last 2 years is either admin or deal sourcing/structuring people whose wages can't be capitalised as they don't directly work on cases. Just a guess.

IMF's partner in the US isn't FIG, it's Fortress (FIG is just a retail fixed income manager here in Aus that IMF uses to raise debt because it can't yet raise bank debt). IMF hired a placement agent (Mercury), and Mercury got Fortress to sign a US$150m commitment to IMF, Mercury gets a fee. IMF had two very basic options to establish a third party US fund: 1) raise funds itself with help of placement agent, or 2) acquire, and obviously they went for (1). Burford went for (2). There's pluses and minuses to both approaches - acquiring gets immediate scale but it's also expensive ($175m, in Burford's case).

The value of alternative asset (infrastructure, real estate, litigation financing etc.) funds management platforms in an acquisition scenario is typically less about the performance fees, and more in the base fees. In the acquisition of an FM platform, the acquirer usually acquires the target at (face value of accrued performance fees + multiple on base EBIT) or a close variant thereof. So if i were to very, very roughly guess what Burford did, they might've looked at GK and said they earn $9m EBIT from recurring (base) fees, we're happy to pay say 15x for that = $105m (given base fees will grow as they deploy dry powder), and there's $70m of accrued performance fees which we buy at face, so total consideration is $105m + $70m. That's how these sorts of deals tend to work, at least in my experience.