Kerr's People

Robert Mohamed

Director, debt capital markets and head, transaction management, Deutsche Morgan Grenfell

What's long on words and short on sex appeal? Try Euromarkets documentation specialist. You have to admit that the image is clerical grey. Say it twice out loud and you may feel your eyes begin to glaze over.

Snap out of that slumber. Ask any good executive recruiter which are the hottest job areas at the Euromarkets. Salesmen are out. Syndicate wizards are yesterday's men. Equity analysts are passé. The in-people are proprietary traders and credit researchers ­ and documentation specialists.

That's good news for Robert Mohamed, 35, who heads the transaction-management group at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell. He found his feet after dmg recruited fixed-income supremo Edson Mitchell and his New York associate Grant Kvalheim. Previously they were all colleagues at Merrill Lynch. Mohamed had joined Merrill in 1989 and was persuaded to move to dmg by Abigail Hofman, who then defected to bzw as head of global origination this summer.

Why did Mohamed leave Merrill Lynch, the supreme international fixed-income house for new issues? Some disenchantment may have come from working with the feisty and demanding John McNiven who ran the international capital markets group with great success before leaving for Hong Kong to take over Merrill's Asian operations.