Robert S. Whitelaw
Mr. Whitelaw founded Graue Mill Partners, LLC ("GMP") in December 2000 and has played an active role in its development and in overseeing the firm's first two investments, Vetbrands International and OPUS Interactive. He currently sits on the board of Vetbrands, a Sao Paulo based producer of animal health products, which was acquired from Cargill, Inc. in May 2002. In this transaction, it was essential that GMP's interests in the company be aligned with a Brazilian financial partner. This was successfully achieved through a co-investment by Axxon Group, a well established private equity firm based in Rio de Janeiro, whose principal investor is Banque Natexis, a large, Paris-based banking group. Vetbrands has benefited from the resurgence of the agricultural sector in Brazil overall, and the GMP exit strategy should result from the inevitable consolidation of a still highly fragmented industry.

Prior to founding GMP, Mr. Whitelaw spent over twenty years as an investment banker to corporations of various sizes both domestically and abroad. His expertise has focused on capital raising, corporate finance and strategic advisory. For the four years prior to forming GMP, Mr. Whitelaw was Managing Director and Head of the Chicago corporate finance office for PaineWebber Group, where he re-staffed and refocused the firm's investment banking effort in the Midwest to leverage the middle-market, research driven approach of the firm. In doing so, he developed an integrated focus in the business services sector, in which assignments were completed for companies such as May & Speh and Korn/Ferry.

For the previous seventeen years, Mr. Whitelaw served in various, increasingly senior roles at Merrill Lynch & Co., most recently as Managing Director and Head of the Midwest Financial Institutions and Global Insurance Groups in Chicago. As a strategic advisor, he was responsible for a variety of industry altering transactions and/or defensive assignments for clients including BancOne, First Illinois Corporation, National City Corporation, Firstbank Illinois, US Bancorp and The Northern Trust.

Mr. Whitelaw received a BA with honors from Vanderbilt University and a MM from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.