JPMorgan
JPMorgan’s long-time boss in Kuala Lumpur, Steve Clayton, likes to say: ‘Don’t look at the length of the list, look at the size of the wallet.” Clayton and his team may not have done the most deals in KL this year — take a bow Credit Suisse — but they can claim to have done the biggest and the more interesting.
In July, they got a $133 million placement of CIMB stock away for the Malaysian sovereign Khazanah Nasional, a $500 million placement of emerging tech group Edotco, and then they did the biggest IPO of the year in listing the $900 million Lotte Chemical float in July.
Clayton and his colleagues lead managed a $1 billion bond for gaming company Genting, a $1.1 billion bond for CIMB and advising state plantation owners Felda on a $500 million acquisition and, as the year closed, on the big banking merger of RHB and AmBank to create Malaysia’s fourth biggest bank.
Importantly, there was nothing from the 1MDB fund in the picture, JPMorgan being one of the rare outfits in KL to dodge that particularly toxic government bullet.