Arion Capital is a Madrid-based investment company focused on European special situations across credit, real estate and hybrid capital opportunities. The firm originates, structures, and executes transactions for institutional partners and family offices.
Distressed, special situations, and refinancings
Arion invests in the debt of European corporate issuers under operational, financial, or refinancing pressure. The strategy targets secondary loans, bonds, and non-performing exposures where capital structure analysis, recovery value, and process insight create entry at protected levels.
Dislocated and capital-constrained
Arion invests in European real estate with a capital structure agnostic approach, deploying capital across three transaction types: new-money capital to undercapitalized owners, secondary acquisitions of performing and non-performing positions, and balance-sheet workouts for distressed holders.
Across the capital structure
Arion provides bespoke capital to European mid-market issuers, including preferred equity, mezzanine, rescue financing, and structured positions across the capital structure. The strategy seeks to combine capital preservation — through covenants, collateral, and seniority — with returns aligned to transaction outcomes.
Arion's investment discipline was formed in the European credit cycles where dislocation matters most. Our principals started their careers in the midst of the GFC, and have since underwritten capital through the COVID liquidity shock and the European energy and credit crisis that followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The pattern across these cycles informs how Arion works today.
Liquidity is the lens through which Arion reads dislocation. In every cycle the firm has worked through, liquidity is what moves first — narrowing before fundamentals deteriorate, evaporating when stress arrives, returning unevenly across asset classes and capital structures. The price of an asset in a crisis is the price of the marginal seller's need for liquidity, not the price of the asset's underlying value. The gap between the two is where the opportunity sits, and where the discipline of recovery underwriting begins.
That lens shapes how Arion underwrites. Transactions are analyzed from first principles using fundamental, bottom-up analysis. Diligence prioritizes recovery value, capital structure, counterparty risk, and process risk before assessing upside. The firm operates in European markets where local jurisdiction, language, and creditor-rights knowledge are material to outcomes. Specialist legal, tax, and commercial advisers are engaged on a transaction basis.
Selected transactions. Illustrative and anonymized; further detail available to qualified counterparties under NDA.
Anonymized; further detail available to qualified counterparties under NDA.
Arion Capital was founded in 2021 and is based in Madrid. The firm originates, structures, and executes transactions in European stressed credit, real estate special situations, and hybrid capital.
Arion executes transactions on behalf of institutional partners and family offices on a transaction basis, allowing for efficient capital allocation determined by returns, strategy, and liquidity.
Arion Capital is founded and led by Cliff N. Wagner. Prior experience spans European credit and special situations across multiple jurisdictions, on both principal and execution sides of transactions.