People Moves - Americas

Citigroup's head of hedge fund services to leave

Source: www.efinancialnews.com; June 23, 2008   - Steve Bowman, the head of hedge fund services in Citigroup's investment bank, is leaving the company, according to an internal memo Friday. Bowman, who was responsible for coordinating and helping to consolidate Citigroup's variety of units that serve hedge funds, is leaving after 24 years at the company to "pursue new opportunities," according to the memo from Jamie Forese, Citigroup's head of sales and trading. A Citigroup spokeswoman confirmed the memo, which didn't name a successor. Before leaving, Bowman will "assist us to ensure a smooth transition of his management responsibilities," the memo said. Bowman is the latest hedge-fund executive to recently leave Citigroup's investment-banking unit. In late March, Citigroup ousted its co-heads of prime brokerage, Ali Hackett and Tom Tesauro.

GLG recruits consumer head amid departures

Source: eFinancial News; June 23, 2008   - UK hedge fund manager GLG Partners, several of whose investment and senior staff have left so far this year, has hired a portfolio manager to lead its consumer fund team. GLG said Fabrice Bay would join from DWS/Deutsche Asset Management in August. He is set to lead GLG's consumer fund team and co-manage the firm's Capital Appreciation fund with Ben Funnel, an incumbent GLG manager. Bay was a managing director at DWS in Frankfurt and responsible for €2bn ($3.1bn) in European equities, including a 130/30 fund that takes short positions as well as long. GLG said he would "play an important role in driving forward GLG's offerings" in global long-only and 130/30 funds. A total of 10 investment or other senior staff have left GLG so far this year. The departures of Mathieu Dubicq, John Cenedella, Marcus Burns, Natalie Benjamin-Pinel, Martin Marston and Laurent Pujaide-Lauraine appear on the Financial Services Authorities' register. Financial News reported at the end of April that global macro fund manager Benn Gill had retired while asset manager Udo Herschel left and Michael O’Connor, a trader in Asian debt, equity and convertible bonds, was working out his notice period; and reported that Soraya Charabek, who oversaw marketing in the Middle East, handed in her notice in May. Dubicq was an activist hedge fund manager for GLG. Cenedella has launched a short-only index derivatives fund via his own firm called Forbes. Burns was an analyst in GLG's three-man global consumer team. Pinel has gone to Merrill Lynch. Marston joined Catapult Capital Management, a UK affiliate of US hedge fund Millennium Partners, on May 15 to work as a portfolio manager. Pujaide-Lauraine joined Deephaven Capital Management International in the UK on March 3 to work in the event-driven department. Tony Chedraoui, head of event-driven convertibles at Deephaven said: "We gave [Pujaide-Laurine] a very good offer and feel he can grow within the company and have better prospects here."These departures came before the announcement in April that portfolio manager Greg Coffey is departing GLG. Coffey managed a quarter of the $24bn (€15.4bn) total assets under management that GLG was running at the end of March. GLG said last month it had received redemption requests amounting to $1.7bn from investors in the funds Coffey runs, and said it may lose all but $2bn of the funds managed by him. The FSA register records that GLG employs 113 investment staff and senior employees in the UK. GLG declined to comment on the departures, but said it has hired at least 16 investment staff since the start of the year. They include, Jeffrey Rojek as chief financial officer and Galia Velimukhametova, Warren Touwen and Daniel Geber as portfolio managers. A spokeswoman for GLG said: "In relation to the 10 departures this year, six of those left by mutual agreement, one of those was a junior sales assistant, one moved abroad for personal reasons and two moved on for other opportunities. During this period we have hired an additional 16 investment professionals. As a firm of over 360 employees, we believe this is positive and healthy turnover as we continue to improve and upgrade the quality of our investment professionals.”

Deutsche shuts equity sales desk

Source: www.efinancialnews.com; June 23, 2008   - Deutsche Bank is closing its mid-market equity sales team only a week after parting with about 30 staff from its global equity and derivatives teams in London. The mid-market equity sales trading business, which constitutes six bankers, will close on June 30. Some members of the team will be reabsorbed into the bank’s general equity sales business and others will be made redundant, according to sources close to the situation. Deutsche Bank declined to comment. The mid-market team looked after the bank’s small and mid-cap companies who were seeking to raise capital through the equity markets. In February the head of the mid-market team, Charles Rowe, left after about seven years at Deutsche Bank. He joined independent equity broker Pali International two months ago. The source said: “That [mid-market equity sales] team operates on a commission basis and it was very expensive for Deutsche Bank as a result. People would only bring in £2.5m (€3.1m) or so and get more than £500,000 as payment. It was an expensive way to get the extra revenue.” Last week the bank laid off about 30 bankers from its equity and derivatives teams in London, including equity trader Deji Adeniran, who had been at Deutsche for four years.

Citigroup to Cut 10% of Investment Banking Jobs

Source: www.wsj.com; June 23, 2008   - Citigroup Inc., in the latest sign of bloodletting on Wall Street, is set this week to embark on an aggressive round of layoffs within its investment-banking division, people familiar with the matter said. The New York bank, which has suffered $15 billion in losses over the past two quarters and is likely to rack up billions of dollars in additional write-downs in the second quarter, this week will dismiss thousands of investment-banking employees world-wide as part of a plan to cut the roughly 65,000-employee group by 10%, the people said. Pink slips are likely to be handed out Monday. "Citi indicated earlier this year that it would be resizing this business in response to market conditions and as part of our ongoing re-engineering efforts," spokesman Dan Noonan said, without confirming specifics. Across Wall Street, investment banks are adjusting to meager times as they deal with drop-offs in everything from mergers to initial public offerings. Citigroup, which has more than 350,000 employees around the world, had fired at least 9,000 workers as of March 31. Still, the coming cuts are unusual in their scope and severity. Mergers-and-acquisitions bankers are expected to see especially sharp cuts, in part because their ranks were not trimmed as much as other units earlier this year. But no major department is likely to be spared, aside from some businesses in emerging markets and Citigroup's lucrative transactions-services arm. Entire trading desks in New York and other cities are expected to be eliminated. And unlike Citigroup's other recent reductions, this round will feature layoffs of dozens of senior managing directors, the people said. The cuts are the first big move by John Havens, who took the helm of Citigroup's institutional-clients group, which includes the investment bank, in late March. Mr. Havens, a longtime lieutenant of Citigroup Chief Executive Vikram Pandit, has concluded that some of the investment bank's businesses have been rendered obsolete by the credit crunch, while he sees others as operating inefficiently and generating inadequate returns. Mr. Pandit's goal is to reduce the firm's annual expenses by $15 billion.