Connor O'Brien (alpine skier)

Connor Olev Martin O'Brien (born 4 February 1961) is a Canadian investment-fund manager. He is president and chief executive officer of O’Shares Investments, a U.S.-based ETF adviser, as well as president, chief executive officer and chief investment officer of Stanton Asset Management, a Montreal-based investment-management company, which he founded in 2002. O’Brien had previously established a private-equity investment firm, Stanton Capital Corporation, in New York City. Before establishing his own businesses, he held positions at Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers.

O’Brien is a former alpine skier who represented the United Kingdom in the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo and Estonia in the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer.

O'Brien was born and raised in Montreal and holds British and Estonian citizenship, as well as Canadian. His father was born and raised in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and his mother immigrated to Canada from Estonia as a child in 1944. When Estonia gained its independence from the Soviet Union, O'Brien became an Estonian citizen by birthright.

O’Brien attended schools in Montreal and went on to Middlebury College in Vermont, where he received a BA degree in physics and economics and was a member of Middlebury's alpine ski team. He then earned an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.

O’Brien began his career as an associate at Lehman Brothers and then moved to Merrill Lynch, where he was a vice-president for mergers and acquisitions (M&A).

In 1995, he founded Stanton Capital Corporation, a private-equity investment firm. One of Stanton Capital’s first ventures was in the privatization of the Peruvian state-owned steel company SiderPeru. Stanton acted as the financial partner of a team of private investors that included Acerco S.A., as industry partner, and Wiese Inversiones Financieras S.A., an affiliate of Banco Wiese, to acquire the Peruvian steel company SiderPeru. The consortium, named Sider Corp, acquired 96.46% of Siderperu in 1996. Siderperu's employees acquired the remaining 3.54% of Siderperu's share capital. Stanton sold its share to its consortium partners in January 2001.

Stanton ventured into shipping in 1997 when it assembled a team of investors to partner with the Norwegian shipping company Tschudi & Eitzen to acquire ESCO, an Estonian state-owned shipping company that was privatized through O’Brien's family links to Estonia. According to the business daily Aripaev, ESCO has in the last four years accumulated huge debt, and its main shareholders were suspected of siphoning capital out of the company. Stanton sold its interest to Tschudi & Eitzen in June 2001 in order to recoup some money after dismal showings in both MaritimeDirect and Millenium Seacarriers.

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