SG Corporate & Investment Banking has hired five new structured finance professionals for its European fixed-income sales team in London. Dimple Bhawsar joins the derivatives flow group from Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein in Frankfurt. Daniel Seeviour from TD Securities, Faris Tazi from Bank of America and Caroline Bottelier from Deutsche Bank were all hired to distribute credit products. In addition, Barbara Schutz joins the structured credit derivatives sales force from JPMorgan Securities.
Former JPMorgan Securities banker Sandy McLane recently joined DSG Search Partners as head of the financial services practice. McLane will focus on growth in financial services recruiting at DSG Search Partners, which is a brand-new offshoot of The Directorship Search Group. Prior to his work at JP Morgan, McLane began his career in banking at Citicorp Securities and moved to First Union Capital Markets, where he was a founding member of the high yield corporate finance practice.
ING Capital Markets has hired Leonard Woo as a director in the global securitization group, where he will report to Bruce Miller, head of securitization for the Americas. Woo has worked in the multi-seller conduit and structured investment vehicle operations at The Industrial Bank of Japan and Societe Generale. Most recently, Mr. Woo was a partner and financial operations principal at S.F. Solutions, where he developed SIV funding, administration, monitoring and rating agency reporting for structured finance clients.
Thacher Proffitt & Wood has hired Christopher Lewis as counsel in the structured finance group in New York. Lewis' areas of practice will include structured finance, derivatives and cross-border securities. In the past, his practice has focused on cash and synthetic CDOs, credit-linked notes and credit derivatives. He recently worked as issuer counsel on the first rated securitization of credit card receivables originated in the Czech Republic. Lewis had previously worked in the London office of Simmons & Simmons.
Fixed-income auction platform DebtX has hired Greg Parseghian to its advisory board. Parseghian is the former CEO of Freddie Mac who stepped down after two months at the top post amid accounting irregularities. Prior to his stint as Freddie Mac CEO, he had worked as its chief investment officer, and was at the post at the time the alleged accounting manipulations occurred.
Merrick Bank, a subsidiary of specialty servicer CardWorks and an issuer of subprime credit cards, announced that its outstanding credit card receivables has surpassed the half-billion dollar mark, achieving one of its stated marketing objectives in 2004. Merrick now has over 550,000 cardholders and plans to continue to expand, it said in a release.
Charlie Wang joined Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP as a partner in the capital markets department in the firm's Washington, D.C. office. His practice will focus on emerging opportunities in securitization and other forms of finance in China. Wang, a former Chinese law professor and Chinese district court judge, has extensive experience in structured finance and capital markets. Wang's legal background and contacts in the Chinese legal community, combined with the firm's reputation in securitization and other forms of finance, will facilitate in providing unprecedented service for clients with business interests in China.
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) said the median prices of existing homes rose at double-digit rates in 2Q04 in many metropolitan areas. The NAR's metro area home-price report for the second quarter found that 49
of the 128 areas surveyed experienced double-digit annual increases in median resale prices. The places with the top rates of year-over-
year increases in median resale prices were in Las Vegas, Anaheim-Santa Ana (Orange County, Calif.) and the Riverside-San Bernardino area of California.
Due to the departure of Michael Gregory, former editor of ASR, from Thomson Media (TM) to join Key Biscayne, Fla.-based United Capital Markets, Kevin Donovan has been promoted to Editor of ASR. Donovan joined The Thomson Corp. in 2001 to cover the U.S. asset-backed market for the publication. Karen Sibayan will assume additional management responsibilities as managing editor for ASR. Sibayan's career with Thomson started nearly five years ago as an assistant editor of ASR.
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