Vestar Capital Partners Completes Acquisition of Institutional Shareholder Services

New York, NY; April 30, 2014 – Vestar Capital Partners (“Vestar”) announced today that it has completed its acquisition of Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (“ISS”) from MSCI Inc. (NYSE: MSCI). The acquisition was previously announced on March 18, 2014.

Institutional Shareholder Services is a leading provider of corporate governance solutions to the global financial community. The current ISS management team will remain in place and will be meaningful shareholders alongside Vestar in the company going forward. ISS currently has more than 700 employees operating across 15 global offices in 10 countries. Its 1,700 clients include institutional investors, who rely on ISS’ objective and unbiased proxy research and data to vote their portfolio holdings, as well as corporations focused on governance risk mitigation as a shareholder-value enhancing measure.

Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP served as legal advisor to Vestar Capital Partners. Morgan Stanley acted as financial advisor and Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP acted as legal advisor to MSCI on the transaction.

About ISS

ISS, founded in 1985 as Institutional Shareholder Services Inc., is the world’s leading provider of proxy advisory and corporate governance solutions to financial market participants. ISS’ services include objective proxy research and analysis, end-to-end proxy voting and distribution solutions, turnkey securities class-action claims management, and reliable governance data and modeling tools. Clients rely on ISS’ expertise to help them make informed corporate governance decisions. For more information, please visit www.issgovernance.com.

About Vestar Capital Partners

Vestar Capital Partners is a leading U.S. middle market private equity firm specializing in management buyouts and growth capital investments. Vestar invests and collaborates with incumbent management teams and private owners in a creative, flexible and entrepreneurial way to build long-term enterprise value. Vestar is targeting equity investments in the range of $50 million to $150 million in U.S.-based middle market companies with enterprise values ranging from $200 million to $1 billion.

Vestar has extensive experience investing across a variety of industries including Consumer, Healthcare, Digital Media, Diversified Industries/Financial Services, and Information Services. Since Vestar’s founding, Vestar funds have completed more than 70 investments in companies with a total value of more than $40 billion. For more information, please visit www.vestarcapital.com.

Contact:

Owen Blicksilver Public Relations

Carol Makovich
(203) 622-4781
carol@blicksilverpr.com

Jennifer Hurson
(845) 507-0571
jennifer@blicksilverpr.com