Somehow Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson
has lured Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s M&A legend Ken Wilson to work as an unpaid consultant, helping sort out the mess among financial institutions. Does Wilson's casting as would-be savior of struggling financial institutions signal a return to prominence of the off-late neglected M&A adviser?
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Only last summer, the Financial Times noted that M&A advisers, the superheroes of Wall Street during the 1980s and '90s (or archvillains depending on your point of view), had been relegated to the back of the investment banking bus in favor of the mavericks who were "minting money" by focusing on proprietary trading, private equity and credit derivatives. Now that in-house money-making schemes are going bust, merger advisers and their high-priced fees appear poised to regain the top-dog status they enjoyed for two decades. Already the big firms are setting up restructuring advisory units.
Wilson, 61, has been at the M&A game for a long time. With Felix Rohatyn, Steven Rattner and David Verey, Wilson was a heavy hitter on the team that put Lazard LLC among the top merger advisory businesses before departing nearly en masse in the late 1990s.
Bank regulatory attorney Thomas Vartanian of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP worked with Wilson on deals in the 1980s and '90s and recalls him as "a very experienced and brilliant financial services expert" who will add "depth of field" to Treasury.
Until Paulson lured him away, Wilson was heading the Goldman team advising Wachovia Corp. on its options, including a possible sale. - Bill McConnell
See June 28, 2007, story on the seeming irrelevance of M&A advisory shops from the Financial Times
