Gerald A Eppner
Chairman of the Board
President and Chief Executive Officer
Geppner@cygnusls.com
Cygnus LS’s Key Personnel
Gerald A.Eppner is the Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer of Cygnus LS. He founded Cygnus in 2013 as the successor to businesses he started in 2002, some of which were engaged in life settlement operations since 2010. He was associated with other life settlement firms from 2006 through 2009. He is the developer of the LS-backed financing program employed by Cygnus and has collaborated with other members of Cygnus’s strategic team to create the currently offered suite of financing structures. In March 2016, Mr. Eppner joined Doonbeg Group, Inc., one of the team’s members, and became Counselor to Doonbeg’s Board of Directors. Doonbeg Group is a global merchant bank with headquarters in New York City and international offices in London, England; Perth Australia; and Oslo, Norway.
Mr. Eppner was engaged in the private practice of law in New York City for more than 40 years. He retired as a partner in the law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft at the end of 2004 and as Senior Counsel to the Firm at the end of 2005. Mr. Eppner specialized in securities and corporate law, with particular emphasis on public and private finance and mergers and acquisitions. Over the course of his practice, he represented publicly owned and privately held companies in a broad range of fields. He also represented investors, venture capital firms, private equity firms and major underwriting firms as well as institutional financial firms both in the United States and abroad. His IPO practice ranked for many years among the leaders in the United States and included work for emerging technology companies in this country, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Prior to entering into private legal practice, Mr. Eppner held various positions with the United States Government in Washington, D.C. These included seven years at the Securities and Exchange Commission, where he served as a member of the Staff in the Division of Corporation Finance,; as a Trial Attorney engaged in the Commission’s enforcement activities under the Investment Company Act and the Investment Advisers Act; as a Legal Assistant to a Commissioner; and as Legal Assistant to SEC Chairman Manuel F. Cohen. Mr. Eppner’s government career also included service as an engineer engaged, among other things, with an inter-agency governmental program that was a predecessor of NASA.
Mr. Eppner holds a Bachelor of Management Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a Masters of Mechanical Engineering from RPI and a Juris Doctor degree (with highest honors) from The George Washington University School of Law, where he was an editor of the Law Review, was admitted to the Order of the Coif and published on Constitutional law.
Mr. Eppner has served as an outside director on the Boards of Directors of several public, and many privately owned, corporations; those enterprises, as well as private businesses of which he was a founder, were engaged in a broad range of businesses. Recently, he became a civil/business mediator and is a member of the New Jersey Association of Professional Mediators. He is also an Adjunct Professor in Economics at Bergen (New Jersey) Community College and a consultant to its business accelerator (incubator).
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