Bernhard Capital Partners, the private equity firm founded by Jim Bernhard and his top executives from The Shaw Group, has acquired The MCC Group, a 57-year-old Metairie-based mechanical and industrial construction company with a network of clients and fabrication facilities throughout the Southeast.
Sources familiar with the deal confirm the sale closed today for an undisclosed price. MCC President Joe Jaeger, reached by phone this afternoon, says he could not answer questions about the transaction.
“We have signed a nondisclosure and will not be at liberty to make any statement,” he says.
Officials with BCP did not return calls seeking comment.
The acquisition will add considerably to BCP’s rapidly growing portfolio of companies in the pipe fabrication, industrial and mechanical construction, and energy services sectors.
MCC was founded in 1958 and since the early 1980s has been run by the Jaeger family—first by Joe Jaeger Jr. and since 2014 by Joe Jaeger III. As of 2008, the company had revenues of nearly $250 million, more than 100 employees in its corporate office and 750 employees throughout the Southeast. It has satellite offices in five locations in Mississippi, North Carolina, Florida and Tennessee, and four fabrication sites in Kenner, Mississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee, according to its website.
The MCC acquisition is the latest feather in Bernhard’s cap. Since retiring in 2013 from The Shaw Group in the wake of the company’s acquisition by CB&I and founding BCP, Bernhard has amassed a network of companies that do what The Shaw Group formerly did and are run by many of The Shaw Group’s former managers and executives. The Shaw Group was acquired by CB&I in 2013.
In July, the firm announced the creation of Brown & Root, a new industrial services company with an old established name, that it formed by combining Wink Engineering—which it had acquired just one month earlier—and an industrial services division of Houston-based KBR.
Other companies under BCP’s control include Bernhard Mechanical, the mechanical construction company founded by Jim Bernhard’s grandfather nearly a century ago; EP Breaux Electrical; Arkansas engineering firm TME; Bernhard Energy, which promises to develop district energy systems and power plants; and Epic Piping, a pipe fabrication company that is developing a 70-acre fabrication facility in Livingston Parish as well as a facility in Texas.
—Stephanie Riegel
