London-based hedge fund giant Brevan Howard has hired Stephen Stonberg, managing director and former head of European credit derivative sales at JPMorgan in London, as head of business development. Stonberg declined to comment and officials at the USD10 billion hedge fund did not reply by press time.
Stonberg left JPMorgan in June. His duties have been absorbed by Oldrich Masek, head of the securitized product group.
Stonberg was a high-profile hire from Deutsche Bank in 2001, where he was global head of the structured products group. Market observers who knew him at the German firm described him as a "whiz-kid" brought on board at JPMorgan with much fanfare to beef up the firm's repackaging and structured credit expertise (DW, 8/13/2001). He was instrumental in a number of key launches, including the flagship repackaging vehicle Corsair, which to date has issued billions of dollars in investments.
In turn, Stonberg joins a string of big hires at Brevan Howard since the hedge fund's launch in 2003 by Alan Howard, former head of propriety trading at Credit Suisse.