Marc Lasry is the Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Avenue Capital Group, a global alternative investment manager focused on distressed and undervalued debt and equity opportunities in the U.S., Europe and Asia. In 1995, Mr. Lasry formed Avenue with his sister, Sonia Gardner, with less than $10 million in capital from friends and family. Today, Avenue is one of the largest distressed debt investors globally, managing assets of approximately $11.7 billion, with headquarters in New York City, and offices in London, Luxembourg, Dublin, Silicon Valley, Abu Dhabi and five offices throughout Asia.
Mr. Lasry is known as a pioneer in distressed investing which has been the focus of his professional career for over 37 years.
After law school, Mr. Lasry clerked for the Honorable Edward Ryan, Chief Bankruptcy Judge for the Southern District of New York. He spent the following year practicing law at Angel & Frankel, which focused on bankruptcies.
Mr. Lasry subsequently became the Director of the private debt department at R.D. Smith, the firm where he first became involved in “trade claims,” the market in purchasing and selling to investors the unsecured claims of vendors and other creditors against a debtor. In 1987, he moved to Cowen & Company where he was Co-Director of the bankruptcy and corporate reorganization department. It was at Cowen that he caught the attention of the Texas investor Robert Bass, who was a client of the firm. When he left Cowen, Mr. Lasry went to manage over $100 million for the Robert Bass Group, where he invested in bank debt, senior bonds, and trade claims. The Bass fund Mr. Lasry oversaw was called Amroc Investments, L.P., and, at the time, it stood as one of the largest distressed funds in the U.S. In 1990, he co-founded a boutique distressed brokerage firm, keeping the Amroc name and maintaining the affiliation with the Robert Bass Group.
Mr. Lasry is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and he has served and will continue to serve on various other boards of advisors/directors of both for-profit and not-for-profit private and public companies. He is also co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks NBA team.
Mr. Lasry received a B.A. in History from Clark University (1981) and a J.D. from New York Law School (1984).
