More high-profile ructions at the London office of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell (DMG). Senior debt-origination director Abigail Hofman walked out the door into Leadenhall Street for the last time in March, disillusioned at the direction the bank is taking. She will be missed, especially as she has a particularly strong relationship with Deutsche's most important client, the World Bank, and also the Inter-American Development Bank. A key part of the three-strong debt funding group headed by Roy Boecker, she had yet to accept other job offers at the time Euromoney went to press.
Two days after she handed in her resignation on March 18, Edson Mitchell was in London and tried to persuade her to change her mind. Having arrived from Merrill Lynch four years ago to join a "European bank", she was said to be upset by her feeling of déjà vu. In the past nine months, 43 Merrill staff have followed their old boss, now DMG's head of global markets, Edson Mitchell. One German newspaper recently referred to the Edson Mitchell "sect", which has formed.
The latest recruit is John Winter, recruited by Mitchell as a Merrill graduate trainee in the 1980s, and brought over from his position as head of German capital markets at Merrill's Frankfurt office. He will head Deutsche's debt capital markets in London, and will report to joint global heads of debt Grant Kvalheim in New York (ex-Merrill) and Hans Werner Voigt in Frankfurt (not ex-Merrill).
Winter's appointment has unsettled the power structure in London. The debt funding group, of which Hofman was a part, felt particularly worried by the change, and the new approach to origination strategy it might involve.
However, a DMG spokesman says the influx of Merrill people must be looked at in perspective. Since the beginning of 1995 the bank has recruited 185 people globally, so "in the scale of things, it is not huge". SI