Nomura Departures Rise as Former Lehman Bankers Leave (Update2)
March 11, 2010, 3:24 AM EST(Adds comment from Nomura in 11th paragraph.)
By Cathy Chan
March 11 (Bloomberg) -- Nomura Holdings Inc.’s vice chairman of China investment banking and head of equity capital markets for Asia outside Japan left the Tokyo-based company, according to people with knowledge of the departures.
Jane Wang, vice chairman of China investment banking, resigned and plans to join a competitor, two of the people said, requesting anonymity because her departure hasn’t been announced. Geoffrey Feldkamp, responsible for share underwriting in Asia outside Japan, also left, one person said.
Wang and Feldkamp are former Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. bankers who joined Nomura, Japan’s largest brokerage, when it acquired Asian assets of the bankrupt Wall Street firm in 2008. Their departures bring the number of senior defections from Nomura to at least five in the region since guaranteed bonuses to former Lehman workers were paid this month.
Wang, 42, was based in Hong Kong. She joined Deutsche Bank AG in 2000 and was promoted as co-head of China investment banking in 2004. Lehman hired her the following year as head of China corporate finance.
During her stints at Deutsche Bank and Lehman, she helped win work arranging share sales for Dongfeng Motor Group Co. and China Citic Bank Corp.
Nomura ranked 14th in arranging equity and equity-linked offerings in Asia outside Japan in 2009, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. This year, it helped arrange the IPO of United Co. Rusal, the first Russian company to go public in Hong Kong, where Feldkamp was based.
Bonus Payouts
Sigurbjorn Thorkelsson, Nomura’s head of equities for Asia Pacific, and Thomas Siegmund, the firm’s co-head of fixed income for Asia outside Japan, left this month. Macquarie Group Ltd. hired Gaurav Gupta, Nomura’s former head of telecommunications, media and financial banking in India, as head of the Indian operations at its advisory unit.
Nomura added about 8,000 workers in the takeover of Lehman units in Asia and Europe and guaranteed salaries and bonuses for key employees. Former Lehman workers in Asia who were guaranteed bonuses in return for agreeing to stay received those payouts on March 1, people with knowledge of the matter said.
Among the roughly 200 former Lehman employees who received guaranteed bonuses, about 95 percent are still with Nomura, said one of the people.
‘Normal’ Turnover
“Turnover is normal at this point in the cycle and in this industry,” said Matthew Russell, a spokesman for Nomura in Hong Kong, in an e-mail. “We are confident that we have good businesses, a deep management bench, and we continue to attract high calibre recruits with extensive experience in the industry.”
Russell declined to comment on the departures of Wang and Feldkamp. Nomura has hired about 420 people in Asia outside Japan since the Lehman acquisition, he said.
Nomura hired David Puritz, head of U.S. convertible bond trading at Deutsche Bank AG, to run the business in New York, two people familiar with the situation said.
The company also hired Mark Edgar of JonesTrading Institutional Services LLC as head of convertibles sales in New York, along with sales traders Chuck Manning, Gildo Niutta
and Meredith Curley, also from the same firm, earlier this year. It also hired convertibles traders Joseph Venn of CIBC World Markets and Douglas Finnegan of JonesTrading.
--Editors: Joost Akkermans, Brett Miller
To contact the reporter on this story: Cathy Chan in Hong Kong at kchan14@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Philip Lagerkranser at lagerkranser@bloomberg.net
