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November 24, 2008 - Ramesh Singh, head of real estate and securitized (RE&S) products. is departing UBS to spend more time with his family and to subsequently pursue other career opportunities, according to an internal UBS memo. The firm also announced that its refocused real estate and securitization activities will be headed by managing directors Bill Chandler, Jack McCleary and Jim Reichek, who will report directly to Jerker Johansson, chairman and chief executive officer of UBS Investment Bank, and Jeff Mayer, the global co-head of the fixed income, currencies and commodities business. Bill Chandler becomes head of transaction management for the group. In this role, he will be responsible for the portfolio management of several existing securities programs and various other special situations. He will also be responsible for the transactions requiring pre-approval (TRPA) process within RE&S. Jim Reichek will continue in his role as U.S. head of real estate finance, with responsibility for all commercial loan origination in addition to all trading in CMBS; and Jack McCleary is named head of ABS and MBS trading activities. He will oversee the firm's client-facing businesses, which will include selective market making in non-agency securities, as well as portfolio analysis and restructuring services. In addition, passthrough trading will be integrated within the bank's rates trading desk in Stamford, reporting to David Sacco.
November 17, 2008 - RiverSource Investments, a unit of Ameriprise Financial, has hired Todd White as structured assets sector team leader. White will be a portfolio manager for the following retail and variable portfolio (VP) funds: RiverSource Diversified Bond Fund, RiverSource VP Diversified Bond Fund, RiverSource Limited Duration Bond Fund, RiverSource Short Duration U.S. Government Fund, RiverSource VP Short Duration U.S. Government Fund, RiverSource U.S. Government Mortgage Fund, RiverSource Balanced Fund and RiverSource VP Balanced Fund. He brings to the company over 22 years of experience in fixed-income investing, specializing in MBS, ABS and interest rate trading. Before joining RiverSource Investments, White was managing director and global head of MBS and ABS as well as North American head of interest rate trading at HSBC. Before that, he spent 18 years at Lehman Brothers, most recently as managing director and head of the residential mortgage and option businesses.
November 3, 2008 - Sidley Austin has tapped six partners and a number of counsel and associates from Heller Ehrman. The new partners Sara Brody, Marie Fiala, Michael Rugen and Carol Lynn Thompson will be located in the firm's San Francisco office. Stan Berman joins the firm as a partner in the Washington, D.C. office, and Yang Ing Loong joins as a partner in Hong Kong, residing in Singapore. Brody, Rugen and Thompson focus their practice on securities litigation, including class actions and derivative litigation. They also represent companies and individuals in matters involving the Securities and Exchange Commission and various securities self-regulatory organizations, as well as in internal investigations. Brody was the chair of Heller Ehrman's securities litigation practice group. Rugen has also served as co-chair of Heller's securities litigation practice group, while Thompson co-chaired Heller's San Francisco litigation department.
October 27, 2008 - Prudential Financial's Prudential Fixed Income Management appointed Sara Bonesteel to head up its efforts in identifying new opportunities in the structured asset management space. Bonesteel will also be responsible for developing financing strategies and relationships for its many businesses, including its hedge strategy, CDOs and insurance businesses. Most recently, Bonesteel served as senior managing director at Bear Stearns financial analytics and structured transactions group.
October 13, 2008 - Laurie Goodman, who is head of mortgage strategy at UBS, is leaving the firm, according to sources familiar with the situation. Goodman headed Mortgage Strategist, a weekly research report from UBS's investment research division, which will also stop publication. As of press time, it is unclear where Goodman is headed to. Thomas Zimmerman, managing director and head of ABS and mortgage credit research at UBS, also forms part of Goodman's team and contributed to the Strategist. According to published reports, Goodman launched Mortgage Strategist while she was at Paine Webber in 1993. Before Paine Webber, Goodman also worked at Merrill Lynch, Eastbridge Capital and Goldman Sachs.
October 6, 2008 - Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets appointed Patrick Cogan as a director in its securitized products group headed by Kate Grant. He will be working on the bank's ABCP conduit, Cancara, and reporting to Chris Rigby, head of conduit structuring. Cogan was previously at XL Capital Assurance.
September 29, 2008 - Tim Nicolle joined Eurokommerz as first deputy chief executive officer. He was previously managing director of emerging markets for Deutsche Bank in London. In his new Moscow-based role, Nicolle will oversee for a wide range of Eurokommerz activities, including debt and equity transactions, strategic initiatives, acquisitions and the international expansion of the group's businesses. Eurokommerz is a commercial finance business and is currently the largest factoring company in the CIS region. The firm actively deals with over 24,000 companies across Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. It was only the second quarter of last year that Deutsche poached Nicolle from HVB, where he handled deals from the Eastern Europe-Russia region.
September 22, 2008 - South Africa's Standard Bank in London recently hired David McCaig as global head of securitization. McCaig had been at WestLB from July 1998 until the spring of this year. At WestLB, he headed up asset securitization and commodity finance and oversaw, among other things, a thriving business in financial future flows from banks in Turkey and Kazakhstan. Prior to WestLB, David spent seven years at Morgan Grenfell and Deutsche Bank in London, where he was responsible for the origination and structuring of cross-border receivables financings in the emerging markets. It will be interesting to see whether Standard's hire of McCaig marks an effort to build up business in emerging markets. The bank had, in the spring of 2006, made a short-lived attempt to beef up its Latin American operation out of New York, hiring Christian Corcino from Moody's Investors Service and Erick Hernandez from Deutsche. In May of 2007, Corcino left for Deutsche, and Hernandez was let go last December.
September 15, 2008 - Falling victim to current difficult market conditions, GSC Group's U.S. CLO team let go of some of its staff last week, sources said. This is part of a broader restructuring of the firm's corporate credit division. GSC's European CLO group was unaffected by these changes. The firm's U.S. corporate credit group is currently headed by Thomas Inglesby, a senior managing director at GSC.
September 8, 2008 - Standard Chartered Bank appointed Vinod Aachi as the global head of structuring, a newly created position. Aachi will also be a member of the Financial Markets Management Committee and report directly to Lenny Feder, group head of financial markets. Aachi, who will be based in Singapore, was previously at Deutsche Bank in Singapore and Hong Kong, where he was responsible for all structuring in Asia. During his 11 years at Deutsche, Aachi helped build the bank's capability in structuring a wide range of products such as fixed income, credit, currency, equity, commodity and hybrid derivatives. His other responsibilities included sales, credit, pricing, idea generation, trading desk coordination, and legal and regulatory clearances.
August 18, 2008 - TIAA-CREF Asset Management has opened an office in London, its first international office. The new location will be staffed by local investment professionals who will extend TIAA-CREF Global Real Estate's activities in the U.K. and Europe to broaden the firm's access to new value-add and long-term investment opportunities. 'This office will strengthen and enhance our global real estate platform in the United Kingdom and Europe, which will help us to continue to grow and actively manage our real estate investment portfolio in these markets and beyond,' said Tom Garbutt, managing director and head of TIAA-CREF Global Real Estate.
August 11, 2008 - Deutsche Bank has combined its ABS and its capital management divisions. The merged global structured credit products team will be run by Frank Byrne in London and Elad Shraga in New York. Byrne was previously co-head of the securitized products group. Shraga was in the principal finance group that bought and traded assets ranging from metals to power plants. The new team is part of the bank's credit-trading business, run by Colin Fan in London and Boaz Weinstein in New York.
August 4, 2008 - Deutsche Bank has promoted Ido Gonen to run its Latin American securitization team, according to a spokesperson at the bank. The banker replaces Brigitte Posch, who recently left to work at Pacific Investment Management Co. (ASR, 7/16/08). He will have tough shoes to fill. Posch worked eight years at Moody's Investors Service, where she earned a reputation for rigor among Brazilian and Mexican clients before hopping over to Ambac for a remarkably short stint of six months, and then Deutsche. Gonen was also at Moody's for a roughly two-year stretch, working primarily in U.S. RMBS, according to a source at the agency. He's been at Deutsche since July 2005. Gonen didn't return a call for comment, while Pimco hasn't returned calls or an e-mail requesting information on Posch's new title and responsibilities.
July 28, 2008 - Avon, Conn.-based Structured Finance Advisors (SFA), which has been an investor in the ABS and MBS sectors since 1993, is teaming up with two commercial mortgage veterans to set up a fund that will take advantage of the current lack of market liquidity in the sector, according to Joe Lorusso, president at the firm. The fund is starting out with $10 to $20 million in equity, with a bank that would leverage the equity about 3X, and is targeted toward $300,000 to $2 million loans that have a 65% current LTV. The average loan will be $1 million. These loans will be made out to cash-flowing, profitable businesses that have a pro-forma positive debt coverage ratio. SFA is teaming up with Fred Dupuy and Rich Sleight, who combined have 40 years of experience in commercial real estate. Currently, according to Lorusso, banks have exited the commercial mortgage loan business and SFA, with the help of Dupuy and Sleight, will extend loans to commercial mortgage businesses that are expanding or buying a facility. Lorusso said that SFA's role is to make sure that the criteria are met, to review the loan files and to do the monitoring. 'There's opportunity in this end of the market to take advantage of,' he said. The company's Web site is sfa-invest.com.
July 21, 2008 - PACIFIC INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT CO. (Pimco) recently poached Brigitte Posch, a veteran of Latin American ABS, from her post as head of Latin American securitizations at Deutsche Bank. Jibing with the trend of i-bankers crossing to the buy-side, the move comes after a stint of slightly more than two years at the German bank. No word yet on her new position. A Pimco spokesman didn't return a call for comment. Before Deutsche, Posch spent six months at Ambac, and before joining the monoline, she worked for eight years at Moody's Investors Service.
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