Korosh Farazad — Founder & Chairman, Farazad Group

Korosh Farazad is the Founder and Chairman of Farazad Group of Companies and Director of KGT Hotel Capital. A visionary entrepreneur, he upholds market integrity and takes an unconventional approach to structured financing.

Farazad Group Ltd. comprises subsidiary companies including Farazad Investments (HK), Farazad Advisory GmbH and Farazad Ventures.

His unique approach has been instrumental to the group's success, earning international recognition from regulatory bodies that actively seek his expertise. This transparent approach to financing and creative thinking led to the development of an award-winning in-house financing formula, which has been praised by international institutions seeking to adopt and enhance traditional funding methodologies.

Alternative Financing

Leadership

Business Leadership & Career Track Record

Korosh Farazad founded Farazad Group with a clear thesis: that clients navigating complex capital decisions deserve advisors who combine institutional discipline with the judgment that only comes from doing deals personally, over decades, across multiple jurisdictions. As Founder and Chairman, he has built that thesis into a firm with a genuine international footprint offices in Hong Kong, Zug and Seoul and a track record spanning real estate, hospitality, and structured finance transactions worth billions of dollars. His career path reflects the same conviction. Long before founding Farazad Group, Korosh Farazad built his experience across international finance and real estate investment, developing the cross-border perspective that now defines the firm's approach. That foundation led to the creation of Farazad Investments (HK) as the group's primary investment banking entity, followed by the establishment of Farazad Advisory GmbH in Zug, Switzerland, and Farazad Ventures three complementary entities under a single leadership vision. Today, his role spans the full breadth of the firm's activity: setting strategic direction, personally leading its most significant mandates, and maintaining the relationships with regulators, institutional investors and family offices that a boutique firm depends on. What distinguishes his leadership journey is consistency of philosophy across three decades of change in global finance a preference for direct client relationships, a willingness to structure unconventional solutions where conventional ones fall short, and an insistence on market integrity that has shaped the culture of every entity he leads. The sections below explore each dimension of that work in more detail from international finance strategy, to structured finance execution, to the advisory relationships that sit at the centre of the firm's client base.

Korosh Farazad Advisory & Farazad Advisory GmbH

Farazad Advisory GmbH is the Zug-based, Swiss advisory entity within the Farazad Group structure established to give clients a dedicated point of access to Korosh Farazad's advisory relationships and expertise from within Switzerland's regulatory and financial environment. While Farazad Investments (HK) remains the group's primary investment banking entity, Farazad Advisory GmbH exists specifically for clients whose needs are best served by a Swiss-based advisory relationship: proximity to European counterparties, familiarity with Swiss regulatory expectations, and the discretion long associated with Zug as a financial centre. Prospective clients are sometimes uncertain which entity within the Farazad Group structure is the right first point of contact. As a general guide: engagements centred on investment banking, real estate transactions, or project finance typically sit with Farazad Investments (HK), while advisory-led engagements strategic counsel, capital structure guidance, or advisory support for a Swiss or European transaction are more naturally suited to Farazad Advisory GmbH. In practice, the distinction matters less to the client experience than it might suggest. Korosh Farazad's involvement, judgment and network are consistent across both entities; what differs is the regulatory home and the specific engagement model. The client engagement model at Farazad Advisory GmbH begins with a direct conversation about the situation at hand not a standardised intake process reflecting the firm's boutique approach even within its most formally advisory-branded entity. Clients considering a Swiss-based advisory relationship, whether for a transaction, a strategic decision, or ongoing counsel, are encouraged to reach out directly to begin that conversation.

Structured Finance Expertise in Switzerland

Structured finance is the most technical discipline within Korosh Farazad's practice, and the one most closely associated with Farazad Group's Zug, Switzerland base. In this context, structured finance refers to the design of layered capital structures combinations of debt and equity, senior and subordinated tranches, and tailored financing instruments engineered to match the specific risk profile of a transaction rather than forcing that transaction into a conventional lending template. Some of these structures sit close to securitisation-adjacent solutions, where cash flows or assets are pooled and structured to support financing that a single, undifferentiated loan could not support on the same terms. The typical client situation calling for structured finance is one where conventional bank financing is unavailable, insufficient, or priced inefficiently relative to the underlying risk a cross-border acquisition requiring multiple layers of capital, a re-financing where the existing capital structure no longer fits the asset, or a development requiring capital structured around a phased drawdown schedule rather than a single lump sum. Farazad Group's structured finance mandates have included blended financing packages, refinancing structures for large residential and commercial portfolios, and acquisition financing arranged around bespoke covenant and repayment structures suited to the asset in question. Designing a structure of this kind is rarely a single-step exercise. It typically begins with a detailed review of the underlying asset or cash flows, followed by an assessment of where conventional financing falls short whether on quantum, tenor, covenant flexibility, or price before the tranching and instrument selection process begins in earnest. Each layer of a structured finance solution is priced and negotiated separately, which is part of what allows the overall structure to achieve terms that a single, blended facility could not. Switzerland's regulatory environment plays a meaningful role in how these structures are designed. Operating from Zug gives the firm direct visibility into Swiss regulatory considerations around structured lending and cross-border capital movement knowledge that shapes not just compliance, but the practical design choices made when structuring a transaction for a Swiss or European counterparty, including how instruments are documented and how cross-border tax and regulatory exposure is managed within the structure itself. For clients, the value of this expertise is straightforward: a structure that would be rejected, mispriced, or simply unavailable through a conventional lender becomes achievable when designed by a team that treats capital structuring as a craft rather than a checklist. Korosh Farazad's personal involvement in the firm's most complex structured finance mandates reflects the premium placed on this discipline within Farazad Group's broader practice, and clients bringing a structured finance mandate to the Zug office should expect that same level of senior engagement from the earliest stages of scoping through to final documentation.

Strategic & Capital Advisory for Business Leaders

Not every client need is transactional. A significant part of Korosh Farazad's work with business leaders happens well before any capital structure is discussed in the strategic counsel that shapes whether, when, and how a business should raise capital, pursue growth, or reposition itself in its market. This is capital strategy, distinct from capital execution: the thinking that precedes a decision, not the mechanics of implementing it. The clients drawn to this kind of relationship tend to share a common profile founders and business leaders navigating an inflection point, and family businesses balancing growth ambitions against the realities of ownership and succession. What they are looking for is not a transaction executor but a strategic counsel relationship: someone who understands their business well enough to challenge assumptions, and who has seen enough capital strategy decisions play out well and badly to offer a genuinely informed view. The advisory relationship itself tends to be ongoing rather than mandate-by-mandate. Board-level counsel of this kind works best when it is built on sustained familiarity with a business, its leadership, and its ambitions which is why many of Korosh Farazad's strategic advisory relationships extend well beyond a single engagement. A business leader might seek his counsel on a specific capital strategy question this year, and return eighteen months later for a different strategic decision entirely, with the value of the relationship compounding each time. This distinction between capital strategy and capital execution is worth making explicit, because the two are often conflated. A business leader who needs board-level counsel on whether and how to raise capital is better served, at that stage, by a strategic advisory conversation than by being routed straight into a structured finance process the latter comes later, once the strategic direction is clear, and often draws on the firm's separate structured finance capability once that direction has been set. Strategic advisory engagements of this kind frequently surface questions well beyond the immediate capital decision: how a family business should think about succession alongside a growth strategy, how a founder should weigh dilution against control when evaluating capital strategy options, or how a business leader should sequence multiple strategic priorities competing for the same management attention. These are the kinds of questions best explored in an ongoing counsel relationship rather than resolved in a single meeting, and it is common for a strategic advisory relationship with Korosh Farazad to evolve over time as a business leader's priorities shift. Business leaders and family businesses in Switzerland considering this kind of relationship are encouraged to begin with a direct conversation about where they are today, rather than a fully-formed capital strategy question much of the value in this relationship comes from working through that thinking together, rather than arriving with the answer already decided.

Investment Strategy & International Finance Expertise

Korosh Farazad's approach to investment strategy is built around a genuinely global vantage point not a domestic practice with occasional international deals, but a firm structured from day one around the movement of capital across borders. Operating across the Hong Kong–Zug–Seoul corridor gives him direct, real-time visibility into three of the world's most consequential capital markets: Asia-Pacific's growth economies, Europe's regulatory and institutional depth, and South Korea's position as a bridge between the two. Cross-border transaction experience of this kind is not easily replicated. It requires relationships with counterparties, regulators and co-investors in each jurisdiction, built over years rather than assembled for a single deal and it requires an investment strategist who can translate opportunity in one market into a structure that works for capital sourced in another. This is where Korosh Farazad's international finance expertise is most visible: identifying where global capital flows are heading before they arrive, and structuring transactions that let clients participate in that movement with confidence rather than exposure to unnecessary jurisdictional risk. His view on international finance trends is shaped by pattern recognition across markets rather than a single regional lens. Where a domestically-focused advisor might see an isolated opportunity or risk, a genuinely global perspective connects it to capital flows, regulatory shifts and investor sentiment elsewhere insight that has repeatedly informed how Farazad Group structures its own mandates, and how its clients think about timing, jurisdiction and structure when allocating capital internationally. For institutional counterparties and family offices evaluating a partner for cross-border work, this multi-jurisdictional fluency not simply a passport stamp in each market is what separates a genuine global capital allocation practice from one that merely has offices in several time zones.

Market Integrity Leadership

Market integrity is not a compliance department's responsibility at Farazad Group it is a leadership stance that Korosh Farazad has maintained publicly and consistently throughout his career. In an industry where speed and aggressive structuring are sometimes rewarded over discipline, he has positioned the firm deliberately on the side of governance and ethical standards, on the view that trust, once lost with regulators or institutional counterparties, is rarely recovered on favourable terms. This governance culture shows up in how the firm operates day to day, not only in formal policy. Transactions that could technically be structured to skirt the intent of a regulation, even where not explicitly prohibited, are approached with the same scrutiny as those with obvious compliance risk. Compliance culture, in this sense, is treated as a leadership value that runs through every entity in the Farazad Group structure Farazad Investments (HK), Farazad Advisory GmbH, and Farazad Ventures alike rather than a jurisdiction-specific requirement applied only where locally mandated. Korosh Farazad has also contributed to broader industry standards beyond his own firm's practice, engaging with the discussion around what responsible structuring and capital allocation should look like in cross-border finance — work that reflects a belief that market integrity is a collective responsibility among practitioners, not merely a matter of individual firm policy. For clients choosing an advisor, this matters more than it might initially appear. A firm's commitment to market integrity is rarely tested when a deal is straightforward; it is tested when a shortcut is available, profitable, and unlikely to be noticed. Institutional counterparties, family offices and regulators alike have long memories for firms that chose the shortcut and equally long memories for those that consistently did not. Korosh Farazad's public stance on market integrity is, in that sense, both a statement of values and a practical signal to prospective clients and partners about what kind of firm they would be working with. It also shapes how the firm handles disagreement with a client or counterparty. Where market integrity and a client's preferred approach are in tension a requested structure that sits at the edge of what governance standards would support, for example the firm's position is to say so directly, even where that costs it a mandate. This is, admittedly, an easier principle to state than to hold to consistently, particularly for a boutique firm where any single mandate can matter materially to the year's activity. That it has nonetheless remained the firm's consistent practice, across a range of market conditions and deal pressures, is arguably the clearest evidence of market integrity leadership in action not the policy itself, but the willingness to apply it when doing so is inconvenient.

Global Strategy

Advisory

Structured Finance

Strategic Advisory

Market Integrity

Unconventional & Alternative Financing Solutions

There are situations often the most consequential ones for a client where conventional financing is simply not available. A distressed asset that traditional lenders won't touch. Collateral that doesn't fit a standard underwriting model. A first-of-kind project with no comparable transaction for a bank's credit committee to reference. This is the territory of unconventional and alternative financing, and it is an area where Korosh Farazad has deliberately built expertise that most conventional lenders and even many boutique advisors choose not to develop. Alternative financing at Farazad Group takes several forms depending on the situation: bridge financing structured to carry a client through a defined period before permanent capital is available; private-credit style solutions that substitute for a bank facility a client cannot access on acceptable terms; and non-bank financing arrangements built around the specific asset or situation rather than a standardised product. What unites these approaches is a willingness to look past the reasons a deal has been declined elsewhere, and ask instead what structure would make it financeable. It is worth being direct about when this approach applies, and when it does not. Unconventional financing is not simply structured finance under a different name where structured finance (see the dedicated section above) is about designing layered capital structures for transactions that are financeable but complex, alternative financing solutions exist for situations that conventional and even sophisticated structured lenders have already declined. A client should generally expect a conversation about structured finance first, with alternative financing solutions reserved for situations where that path is genuinely unavailable. This distinction matters because unconventional financing typically carries a different risk and pricing profile, reflecting the situations it is designed to solve. Clients facing a financing gap that conventional and structured routes have failed to close are encouraged to bring the full situation to Korosh Farazad directly including the reasons other financing has not worked since that context is usually what shapes the alternative structure that ultimately does. Recent examples of this work illustrate the range involved: financing arranged for an early-stage green cement and greentech project where no established lending category yet existed for the technology in question, and financing structured for an assisted living healthcare facility where the asset's specialised nature fell outside standard commercial real estate lending criteria. In both cases, conventional financing routes had already been explored and found unworkable before Farazad Group became involved a pattern typical of the mandates that reach this part of the firm's practice. Clients should expect an unconventional financing conversation to move quickly from problem to possible structure, since the firm's experience across a wide range of prior non-standard mandates means fewer financing gaps are genuinely unprecedented than they might first appear.

Alternative Financing