Apax Partners: The Money Linking Singham and the DNC
Apax Partners, Neville Roy Singham, and the sovereign investors surrounding the DNC’s most important political database
Virtually every major Democratic campaign — presidential, Senate, House, state — accesses its voter data through one platform. NGP VAN has been the de facto sole vendor of the DNC voter file since 2004. Thirty-eight million donors and volunteers in the system. $10 billion in campaign contributions tracked in the 2022 cycle alone. 1.4 billion voter contact attempts. If you’ve ever knocked on a door for a Democrat, your data went into this system. No competing vendor holds a parallel DNC voter file contract.
The company that owns all of it is a London private equity firm called Apax Partners. And four foreign governments hold ownership stakes in Apax.
Who Owns Apax
In 2009 and 2010, Apax sold approximately 10% of its management company — the entity that sits above every fund, controls every investment decision, and collects fees across the entire portfolio — to three sovereign wealth funds:
China Investment Corporation (CIC): 2.3% of the management company plus EUR 685 million into Apax Europe VII. CIC is wholly owned by the People’s Republic of China. Since January 2020, Chinese regulation requires CIC to have a Party Secretary chairing its board and a functioning CCP committee with embedded authority over major business decisions. Its board is dominated by China officials from the Ministry of Finance, NDRC, People’s Bank of China, and SAFE. And China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law, Article 7, requires all Chinese organizations to “support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence work.”
GIC (Singapore): One of two sovereign funds that bought 7.7% of the management company. GIC’s board is chaired by the sitting Prime Minister of Singapore. The same executive chain governs Singapore’s Internal Security Department and Security and Intelligence Division.
Future Fund (Australia): Together with GIC, bought 7.7% of the management company. This is the control case: independent governance, no known intelligence apparatus concern.
A fourth sovereign investor arrived later:
Sanabil/PIF (Saudi Arabia): LP investor in Apax funds, disclosed April 2023. Sanabil is a wholly owned subsidiary of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. MBS chairs PIF, appoints all board members, and holds no formal oversight mechanism. The Intercept noted that Sanabil was also an LP in Insight Partners, the firm that owned NGP VAN before Apax bought it. Saudi sovereign capital had exposure to Democratic campaign infrastructure through both the seller and the buyer.
A management company stake is not an ordinary fund investment. These stakeholders receive pro-rata economics across all Apax funds, management-company-level financial reporting, and — per industry standard — “protection rights” that typically include board observer seats or approval rights over major corporate events. No public divestiture of any of these stakes has been announced. As of this writing, they all appear to be active.
To sum:
Apax Partners’ management company — the entity that sits above every fund, including the one holding Democratic campaign infrastructure — counts China’s CIC and Singapore’s GIC among its owners. CIC is subject to China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law, which requires all organizations to “support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence work.” GIC’s board is chaired by Singapore’s sitting Prime Minister, who also oversees the country’s intelligence services.
Nobody Reviewed This
Voter registration data, party affiliation, donor records, and campaign data are not included in CFIUS’s 10 enumerated categories of “sensitive personal data” under 31 CFR 800.241. Health records, biometrics, credit reports, security clearances: all covered. Political identity data is not covered, which raises new questions.
CIC’s 2.3% stake is below CFIUS’s mandatory filing threshold. The 2010 transaction predates FIRRMA‘s 2020 implementing regulations. I couldn’t find a public record of a CFIUS review of either the CIC-Apax stake or the 2021 acquisition of NGP VAN. No congressional hearing has examined this.
The most electorally valuable dataset in America sits in a regulatory dead zone.
The Founders Tell You What This Is
Apax didn’t stumble into owning Democratic infrastructure. Its founders built the firm from inside center-left political networks on two continents.
Sir Ronald Cohen, co-founder: reportedly gave 1.5 million pounds to the UK Labour Party. Knighted in 2001 under Tony Blair’s government. Described in press as Gordon Brown’s chief fundraiser. Chaired HM Treasury’s Social Investment Task Force. Now chairs the Global Steering Group for Impact Investment across 19 countries.
Alan Patricof, co-founder: finance chair for Clinton ‘92. Finance chair for Hillary’s 2000 Senate race. $100K-$250K to the Clinton Foundation. Member of the Democracy Alliance. Founded Greycroft, whose portfolio includes HuffPost and Axios. Across his FEC record, approximately 99% Democratic.
Democratic Infrastructure as “Social Good”
Bonterra — the umbrella entity holding NGP VAN — does not sit in Apax’s $11 billion buyout fund alongside Sophos and Exact Software. It sits in the Apax Global Impact Fund — a $900 million Article 9 SFDR vehicle specifically designated for “social and environmental issues.”
Apax classified Democratic campaign infrastructure as a social good. That is a fund classification filed with European regulators.
A review of Apax’s full portfolio of 1,448+ investments contains no identifiable Republican campaign technology, conservative political data, or right-wing electoral infrastructure. The firm owns the entire progressive tech stack — voter file, CRM, email, volunteer coordination, FEC compliance, grants management — and to my determination, nothing on the other side.
What Happened to the Infrastructure
Under Apax ownership, the platform that runs Democratic elections has been systematically hollowed out.
September 2023: 200+ more. ActionKit gutted to five developers. MoveOn departed.
2024: The Harris campaign and DNC deployed full-time engineering staff to the company for months to keep the system operational through the election.
The DNC drafted a letter invoking the source code clause — the only contractual leverage it holds over NGP VAN — citing concerns about system stability. Never sent it. Officials concluded it “could backfire in the middle of an election year.”
Fifty-plus Democratic operatives warned about all of this in an open letter in August 2021, within weeks of the acquisition. The layoffs, the degradation, the loss of institutional capacity were all predicted. And yet Bonterra continues to monopolize the Democratic party, and to my knowledge, no Democratic official has raised concerns about foreign ownership over their own data.
The Singham Pipeline
In October 2017, Apax bought ThoughtWorks from Neville Singham for approximately $785 million. Singham owned virtually all of the company. Weeks before the sale closed, Singham incorporated a Delaware shell called Mutod LLC, registered to a hotel address on East Wacker Drive in Chicago. Within a year, $278 million of his proceeds flowed through three channels — Mutod LLC, a Goldman Sachs donor-advised fund, and a second shell called Likewise Conceptions — into a network of U.S. activist organizations aligned with Chinese Communist Party foreign policy positions. An SDNY grand jury is investigating wire fraud, bank fraud, money laundering, FARA violations, and tax fraud.
Chinese government records (NECIPS) still listed Singham as a corporate officer of ThoughtWorks Beijing as of June 2025 — contradicting ThoughtWorks’ public statement that “Roy’s affiliation with Thoughtworks ended when he sold the company in 2017.” When that became a problem, Apax took ThoughtWorks public in 2021 at a debut market cap of approximately $9 billion, then announced re-privatization in August 2024 for $1.75 billion.
What Trump Didn’t Say
On July 16, Trump claimed China “illicitly acquired” 220 million voter files in “the largest compromise of election data in history.”
The actual structure is worse than what he alleged. Chinese government capital legally holds an ownership stake in the management entity controlling the fund that holds the DNC’s entire data infrastructure, and Chinese law obligates that investor to cooperate with state intelligence. Saudi sovereign capital had exposure through both the buyer and the prior seller. Singapore’s PM-chaired sovereign fund owns roughly 4% of the same management entity. And CFIUS doesn’t cover political identity data at all.
And nobody in Congress has held a hearing.
P.S. The Epstein Files
If all of the above weren’t enough, Isabel Maxwell, the sister of Ghislaine, identified herself in the Epstein emails as a consultant to Apax Partners. I don’t know what that means, either.
Apax Partners. It seems as if every subversive political and economic entity on Earth is a tentacle of the "City of London." The Promethean crew is seemingly spot-on.
Thank you for looking behind the curtain, and posting here!