Morgan Stanley's head of European leveraged credit trading has resigned. Robert Lepone, who oversaw various teams, including high yield bonds, leveraged loans, credit default swaps and distressed debt, left Morgan Stanley's London office for personal reasons, a spokesman said. His replacement will be announced in the coming weeks, the spokesman said, declining to comment further. Lepone's departure comes less than two weeks after Joseph McManus, a vice president with Morgan Stanley's investment-grade credit products group, left to join CastleOak Securities' fixed-income sales team.
Paul Levy has joined Prytania Investment Advisors as a partner. Levy will assist Prytania's clients in managing their structured finance and credit portfolio risk. He was the former head of credit structuring EMEA at Merrill Lynch. Before his role at Merrill, Levy worked at Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley.
HML appointed Jonathan Pattinson as the company's new risk director. He will join HML on March 30 from Northern Rock, and has had a wide ranging career in key areas such as audit, risk and compliance. Pattinson replaces Andrew Jones, who has decided to return to a new role in the mutual sector.
Janney added two managing directors to its municipal capital markets group, including one with a specific background in securitization. The hiring of Kimberly Welsh and Matthew Levin follows the growth trend started in 2008 by Janney's capital markets division. Welsh, who is based in Janney's Boston office, provides dedicated banking coverage to municipal bond issuers in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and throughout New England. Previously from Morgan Stanley, where she was head of the New England and national housing groups, Welsh has 20 years of experience working with municipal bond issuers on general infrastructure and revenue-backed bonds. Before Morgan Stanley, she was with UBS/PaineWebber for 18 years. Her experience includes general obligation bonds, sales tax bonds, housing, water, wastewater, transportation and securitizations of various other revenue sources. Levin, who is working from Janney's Philadelphia headquarters, provides dedicated banking coverage to both municipal issuers and their investor-owned utility sectors throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey. He was previously with Goldman Sachs, where he was a member of the public sector and infrastructure banking group. While at Goldman, Levin focused on the sports facility, public power and transportation sectors. Before Goldman, he spent a total of 10 years with Morgan Stanley and Prudential Securities. He has completed more than $15 billion of tax-exempt and taxable financings for issuers of revenue and general obligation bonds, and has worked on all aspects of municipal capital markets deals, including fixed- and variable-rate new money and refunding issues, debt restructurings, interest rate swaps and bond tenders.
Broadpoint Capital, a broker-dealer subsidiary of Broadpoint Securities Group, has tapped a trio from RBS Greenwich Capital for its rates group and sales and trading team. Russell Certo and Glen Capelo join Broadpoint as co-heads of the rates group, where they will work with clients investing in treasuries, agencies and government guaranteed securities tied to the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). Prior to this appointment, Capelo served as a managing director with RBS's U.S. government and agency trading desk. He also spent 17 years at the former Salomon Brothers, including seven years as managing director on the government trading desk. Certo also served as a managing director at RBS before joining Broadpoint. Prior to that, he was with UBS as a director, leading the cross rates dealer group and specializing in agency, Treasury and Libor arbitrage. Additionally, Broadpoint hired Joseph Walker and Steven Sharlach as part of an expansion to its sales and trading desk. Walker joins from Fortis Bank as an institutional sales person and will specialize in rates sales and trading, while Sharlach joins from RBS.
Barclays Capital analysts said that the recent Standard & Poor's downgrade of Danske Bank's credit ratings, where the long-term counterparty rating was lowered to 'A+' from 'AA-' and the short-term rating to 'A-1' from 'A-1+', has important ramifications in MBS transactions, particularly with respect of the liquidity facility provider. The downgrade breached the liquidity facility counterparty ratings trigger in a number of U.K. nonconforming RMBS and CMBS transactions. This has resulted in the affected transactions (mainly Alba 2006-1 and Alba 2006-2) drawing the liquidity facility in full.
(c) 2009 Asset Securitization Report and SourceMedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.structuredfinancenews.com http://www.sourcemedia.com/
