Arturo Cifuentes, managing director and global head of collateralized debt obligation research at Wachovia Securities in New York, has left the firm. Cifuentes declined comment and it could not be determined if he has signed on with another firm. Brian Lancaster, head of structured products research at Wachovia and to whom Cifuentes reported, did not return a call by press time.
A former Moody's Investors Service CDO analyst, Cifuentes had been in his role at Wachovia for about two years. He joined the sell-side firm after a stint at Triton Partners, where he had managed a CDO along with Jonathan Polansky, another Moody's CDO veteran. Cifuentes and Polansky left Triton around the end of 2002, triggering a majority of investors in the deal to dump Triton and bring in ZAIS Group as a replacement manager (BW, 4/21/2003). At the time, it was one of the earliest and most public instances of personnel departures affecting an outstanding CDO, although there have been several such cases since then. The recent departure of Joyce DeLucca and several professionals from Katonah Capital to form Kingsland Capital serves as one.
Meanwhile, Polansky returned to Moody's soon after he left Triton and was recently named head of the asset-backed commercial paper group at the rating agency.