MARKET NEWS
BNP Paribas (BNPP) said on Wednesday that it was in talks with Abbey National to acquire the UK bank?s French subsidiary Abbey National France.
The deal comes after Abbey?s board agreed last week to an £8.6bn takeover by Spain?s Santander Central Hispano.
Abbey National France provides residential mortgages in France to non-resident Britons. It has assets of approximately Eu2.1bn and employs 219 people across France.
No financial terms of the transaction have been disclosed. BNPP and Abbey said the deal should be finalised in the fourth quarter of 2004, subject to regulatory approval.
Assured Guaranty (UK) Ltd, a subsidiary of Bermuda-based insurer Assured Guaranty, this week won permission from the Financial Services Authority to underwrite financial guaranty insurance in the UK.
It plans to begin offering financial guarantees for a range of capital markets transactions, including private finance initiatives, as well as project and infrastructure finance, asset backed securities and collateralised debt obligations.
It also plans to apply for regulatory approval in other countries across Europe.
The London subsidiary will have a financial strength rating of Aa1/AAA from Moody?s and Standard & Poor?s by virtue of certain net worth and reinsurance arrangements with its direct parent, Assured Guaranty Corp.
SENIOR
Eugene McQuade will be the next president and chief operating officer of Freddie Mac. McQuade was most recently president of Bank of America.
He starts at Freddie Mac on September 1, reporting to the chairman and chief executive officer Dick Syron.
McQuade replaces Paul Peterson, who will stay on as a senior adviser during the transition, and then retire. Peterson has been at Freddie for 15 years.
McQuade was the vice chairman and chief financial officer of FleetBoston until it was taken over by Bank of America.
He started his career at KPMG Peat Marwick as an accountant before becoming an executive vice president and controller at Manufacturers Hanover. He joined Fleet Financial Group in 1992
FIXED INCOME
Katsuya Miyoshi is joining Lehman Brothers as head of Japanese government bond trading. He moves from Nikko Citigroup where he held the same position. Miyoshi has nine years? experience trading Japanese government bonds and derivatives.
Lehman Brothers is already active in the Japanese government bond market and recently launched a floating rate Japanese government bond index.
BNP Paribas has appointed Rosemary Sisson as head of credit research in the US. Based in New York, she will report to Len Jardine, head of US credit sales and research.
Sisson joins from UBS where she was an executive director and chief administrative officer for global credit research.
Before that she worked as an investment grade bond analyst at UBS covering the retail, supermarkets, consumer products, tobacco and pharmaceutical sectors.
She will be responsible for expanding the credit research team covering the high grade and high yield sectors as well as a credit strategy team.
Nomura has appointed Kristoffer Laurson as a vice president in its global markets group in London, where he will be responsible for DCM coverage of central Europe.
Laurson, who joins Nomura in September, will report to Ulrik Ross, director of Nordic, South African and central European regions.
He joins from UBS, where he had worked since 2000.
Landesbank Baden-Württemberg has hired Fredrick Mehlitz as a new head of syndicate. He reports to Jörg Huber, head of debt capital markets. Mehlitz, who joins from Depfa, brings the number of people on the syndicate desk to four.
?LBBW started the DCM business about two years ago to develop client relationships we had already further,? Huber said. ?and to provide fixed income products to borrowers and to our investor base, which is quite large. It is part and parcel of our policy here to establish ourselves as a regional player.?
INVESTMENT BANKING
ABN Amro has established a life and pensions advisory team as part of its financial markets advisory (FMA) group.
Greg Major, global head of the bank?s FMA group, said the role played by trustees in recent merger and acquisition deals had been a driver behind establishing the advisory group.
In June, Credit Suisse First Boston became the first investment bank to be appointed by the pension fund trustees of Marks & Spencer in what was widely considered by bankers in London as a landmark development.
Francis Fernandes has been hired from consulting actuaries Lane, Clark and Peacock to head the actuarial side of the new business. Based in London, he reports to Greg Major, global head of FMA within the bank?s financial markets business.
Keith Jecks has been appointed global head of pension fund coverage. He joins from pensions consultancy Watson Wyatt, where he was a partner in the investment practice. Jecks will be based in London and reports to Andrew Graham, global head of investor client group within the bank?s financial institutions and public sector (FIPS) client coverage group.
Ferry Jacob joins the team as a modeler from Aon, and Peter von Richthofen moves from within the bank to focus on solutions structuring within life and pensions advisory.
SYNDICATED LOANS
Royal Bank of Scotland has transferred Sandra Pemberton from its London loan markets team to its Asia Pacific loan markets team, based in Hong Kong.
Pemberton has been with Royal Bank of Scotland for 17 years. For the last five she has been a senior member of the London distribution team. Pemberton, who arrives in Hong Kong by the end of August, will work on developing investor contacts and originating deals in the Asia Pacific region.
Pemberton will report to Steve Hughes, head of Asia Pacific loan markets for Royal Bank of Scotland, based in Sydney.
Leveraged finance
Mike Ramsay, formerly head of leveraged finance at Prudential M&G in London, will be going to private equity house Carlyle to start a debt business. He will start in September. A spokeswoman for Carlyle declined to comment.
There are rumours that other private equity houses are looking at establishing vehicles to invest in the leveraged loan market, including Blackstone, Apollo, Permira and CVC. Duke Street Capital was the only house in Europe with a debt business, but in March divested it to US investment manager David L Babson.
Colin Atkins, director and long-standing back-up portfolio manager for client accounts and collateralised loan obligations (CLOs) at Prudential M&G, has replaced Ramsay as senior portfolio manager.
Simon Hood, most recently managing director and senior portfolio manager at ING Capital Management, has joined European Credit Management Limited (ECM). Hood will be working in the company?s leveraged loan business, investing in loans through a newly established vehicle called ëLeveraged Loans Europe,? as well as through some of its existing funds.
Hood, who has already started with ECM, is working with Matthew Craston, formerly a managing director in UBS?s leveraged finance group. At ING, Hood was responsible for the two Copernicus CDO funds.
STRUCTURED FINANCE
BlueBay Asset Management, which specialises in European fixed income credit, has hired Alex Khein from Morgan Stanley to establish a structured products and fund derivatives group.
At Morgan Stanley Khein was head of European product structuring and execution.
Khein will build the structured products group from scratch with the hire of three or four more people in the next few weeks. The growth of this team will allow BlueBay to enter the market as a CDO manager while managing the non-investment franchise risk in CDOs.
?We have had a few approaches over the last year from investment banks,? said Hugh Willis, chief executive of BlueBay Asset Management in London. ?We intend to be managing our first CDO of corporate bonds or emerging market credit in the next six to nine months.?
Khein and his team will also be responsible for developing fund derivatives.
?BlueBay has already done some principal protected distribution of the long only fund in Japan and this is an area that we want to develop,? said Willis.
Khein will be responsible for developing BlueBay?s move into the ABS market. Initially, this will be in managing structured products and then later establishing and managing stand-alone funds.
JP Morgan has hired Matthew Read as a vice president in its corporate financial engineering group (CPEG). Reporting to Russell Schofield-Bezer, head of CPEG for credit and rates in Europe, Read joins from accounting firm Deloitte & Touche. Before that he trained as a chartered accountant with Arthur Anderson.
He will work with Simon Emery within the CPEG?s accounting solutions group.
Nomura has appointed Nitin Bhandari as a senior director in its asset finance group in London. He will report to Gary Wilder and Derek Vago, co-heads of Nomura?s asset finance group.
Bhandari will work across origination and management of real estate and other asset finance transactions. He will also be responsible for all capital markets related businesses within the group, including CMBS, RMBS and corporate securitisations.
He joins from Bear Stearns in London where he was a managing director in the bank?s principal and asset-backed finance team, responsible for its principal and real-estate finance business in Europe. Before that he worked for Nikko Principal Investments and UBS Warburg in London.
EQUITY
Royal Bank of Canada has made three appointments to its global mining team. Christopher Law and Ayesha Hira are hired as mining specialists in equity sales in London and Geoff Breen as a senior mining analyst in Sydney.
Law joins from HSBC where he was most recently head of mining, specialist sales.
Hira joins from CIBC World Markets, where she was a research associate covering the gold and precious metal sector. Breen joins as a director of the firm and a senior mining analyst. He moves from JP Morgan.
Credit Suisse First Boston has appointed Pierpaolo Arcangioli to the new position of head of Italian equity capital markets. Arcangioli will join the bank in September and will be based in its London office, reporting to Paul Raphael, head of European ECM.
Arcangioli joins from Merrill Lynch, where he was a managing director in its ECM business, working on deals such as the 2000 Eu4.8bn privatisation of Finmeccanica and last December?s Unicredito?s Eu1.2bn exchangeable into Assicurazoni Generali.
Before joining Merrill Lynch in 1997 Arcangioli worked for three years at Morgan Stanley, splitting his time between the bank?s London and Milan offices.
ASSET MANAGEMENT
Vince Fea is to take over management responsibility for Deutsche Asset Management?s (DeAM?s) New York credit research team.
As head of investment grade credit research, he reports to Eric Kirsch, who heads fixed income management.
Fea joined DeAM in 2002 from Bear Stearns, where he was head of the corporate bond research department. Before that he had been head of investment grade for Chase Securities. He covers retail, consumer goods and transportation and will continue to do so.
Deutsche Bank is merging its three Australian property funds and is set to spend A$1.5bn on US property assets, creating Australia?s fourth largest real estate investment trust by market value.
Deutsche will combine Deutsche Office Trust, Deutsche Industrial Trust and Deutsche Diversified Trust, and buy 80% of a US industrial property portfolio managed by Chicago-based RREEF.
After the merger has been completed the new entity will have a market value of A$3.5bn, ranking it fourth behind Westfield Group, which is valued at A$25.8bn, General Property Trust at A$7.13bn and Stockland at A$7.11bn.
US asset manager Ariel Capital Management has hired Charles Bobrinskoy as a vice chairman, reporting to chairman and chief investment officer John Rogers Jr.
Bobrinskoy joins from Citigroup where he was a managing director and head of its North American investment banking branch offices and the Chicago investment banking office. Among his new responsibilities will be serving on Ariel?s 10 member board of directors.
COMPLIANCE
Barclays Capital has hired Oliver Cox as director in its global compliance team. He will be responsible for coordinating compliance support, overseeing its investment banking and debt capital markets compliance related businesses globally.
Based in London, Cox will report to Stephen Morse, head of compliance. Cox joins from Lehman Brothers where he was director in legal and compliance coordinating support for its investment banking business.