It's not quite the massive
flow of ex-Bear, Stearns Cos. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. bankers The Deal has
covered, but since Merrill Lynch & Co.'s takeover by Bank of America Corp. (NYSE:BAC), more than a few notable rainmakers have headed for greener pastures.
The bankers are especially hard to hold on to as government bailout money has brought scrutiny to their now-shrinking bonuses. But if you have talent -- and connections -- you have options in finance.
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The most newsy defections involved Deutsche Bank AG, which raided
Merrill, hiring 12 dealmakers -- led by Eric Heaton -- for its FIG
group. A month later it hired a French set of bankers including chief
country officer Marc Pandraud and Emmanuel Hasbanian, head of M&A
for France. Then
Merrill sued Deutsche for grabbing that earlier set of 12. A few days after the suit, Deutsche again returned to announce the
hiring of BofA-bred bankers Masaya Okoshi and Sean George as managing directors for its global credit trading group.
Now to the rest. In our most recent
Movers & shakers column, we
reported on Mark Echlin, Mark Aedy and Jon V.M. Pratt.
Echlin
is
joining Credit Suisse Group's investment banking department as a
managing director and head of industrials, EMEA. He held that same
title at Merrill. Aedy, named head of corporate and investment banking
in EMEA for the combined BofA-Merrill in November, has reportedly left
the firm to pursue "other career and personal opportunities." Earlier,
Aedy ran Merrill's European industrial advisory group. And Pratt joined
wealth management firm Rockefeller & Co. in New York as managing
director for institutional relationships. He was head of Asia-Pacific
debt origination at Merrill.
Mining The Deal's archives back to the January completion of the deal, we see:
- KBW Inc. expanded
its mortgage-backed securities trading team with senior agency
pass-through trader Greg Hargraves, who spent nearly 20 years in the
mortgage business at Merrill;
- Oppenheimer & Co. hired Brian Belski as a managing director and chief investment strategist. Belski was chief U.S. sector strategist at Merrill;
- Evercore Partners Inc. recruited
George Ackert as a senior managing director to establish and lead a
transportation and infrastructure practice. He's also developing a
sports advisory business for Evercore.
At BofA-Merrill Ackert was global head of transportation and
infrastructure;
- CIBC World Markets Inc. tapped
Eric Price as a managing director and head of the New York financial
solutions group. Price was head of U.S. institutional FX sales at
Merrill;
- Amherst Securities Group LP brought in Andrew Beal for agency CMO trading. Beal worked at Merrill for 12 years, where he traded collateralized mortgage obligations;
- Qatalyst Group enlisted
Jean Tardy-Joubert as a partner and head of European investment banking
and opened the firm's London office. Tardy-Joubert was head of European
technology i-banking at Merrill;
- Not a poaching, but obviously significant, Merrill's former CEO and president John Thain was replaced by BofA general counsel Brian Moynihan in late January;
- Robert Chiu joined
Nomura Holdings Inc. as head of TMT investment banking. Previously, he
was regional head of TMT i-banking, Asia-Pacific, and chairman of
Taiwan i-banking for Merrill;
- Longtime Merrill Lynch bankers Daniel Markaity and Christopher Bury have joined Jefferies & Co. as managing directors and co-heads of the fixed-income rates business;
- Vicky Binns, head of equities research at Merrill's Australia operations, went to BHP Billiton Ltd.'s Singapore office. She will lead the mining giant's global team of commodity analysts;
- Another noted move that wasn't a poach: Gregory Fleming, former president and chief operating officer of Merrill, was appointed
as a senior research scholar and distinguished visiting fellow of the
Center for the Study of Corporate Law, both at Yale Law School;
- At the time Fleming left, Merrill's Singapore-based chief Asia strategist, Mark Matthews, reportedly left the firm;
- Thomas Weisel Partners Group Inc. took on
Steven Satov as a managing director in institutional sales. He was a
director of institutional equity sales at Merrill Lynch Canada;
- Greg Margolies joined
Ares Management LLC as a senior partner and head of its capital markets
group. At Merrill, he was head of global leveraged finance and capital
commitments and a member of the executive committee of the i-banking
group.
And to start things off just a few days after BofA
completed its hasty (that's not in retrospect, the deal was kind of
slapped together) acquisition of Merrill Lynch to grab its "thundering
herd" of brokers, Robert McCann, who was vice chairman and president of
the prized global wealth management division at Merrill,
headed for the door. -
Baz Hiralal
