Hans-Joerg Rudloff, doyen of the Euromarket, has positioned himself perfectly for next year's skyburst of activity in euro debt financing.
He's signed up from August 1 as executive chairman of Barclays Capital, which shuns equity trading and underwriting but is world number one in loan syndication and has been climbing the bond bookrunners' league table.
Rudloff, born in Cologne in 1940 and educated in Switzerland, spent 10 years in the 1970s at Kidder Peabody in Geneva before being hired by Credit Suisse First Boston to head debt syndication. In 1982 he nearly completed his greatest syndication: a £27,000 deal to hire an elephant from Regent's Park zoo on which his boss Michael Von Clemm would ride through the City of London. Unfortunately Von Clemm got cold feet and vetoed the idea.
Rudloff spearheaded CSFB's finest years at the head of the Eurobond league tables and became chairman and chief executive in 1989. He also rose to the executive board of Credit Suisse in 1987 and moved to Switzerland in 1993.
Back in the 1980s Rudloff was already talking Barclays' book. "I refused to take on equity business at CSFB, it needs an enormous amount of people and money." But he changed his tune when creating his own vehicle MC Securities in 1995, which was mostly an equity house. In spite of that, the founder members bore an uncanny resemblance to those erstwhile Eurobond market gunfighters of the 1980s: Sheldon Prentice of Salomon Brothers, Peter Ogden of Morgan Stanley and Joan Beck of Morgan Stanley and CSFB. Rudloff found he needed more capital to compete and sold out to Banque Bruxelles Lambert last year. His erstwhile creation is now being merged with ING Bank. "We're a small shop and there are high spreads in equity brokerage in small emerging markets," says Rudloff, who took CSFB into Russia and central Europe as they opened up, one of the handful of senior executives who saw the full potential early on. He wants to maintain his interest in "the conversion countries" particularly Russia whose health is "key to Europe's success", he says.
He also sees an enormous task ahead for someone to sort out the world economy: "The IMF has totally failed, and so have we as a western community. The IMF has responsibility for 500 dead in Indonesia."
As for Martin Taylor's strategy at Barclays and his dumping of BZW's equity business, Rudloff seems to be saying the right things: "The financial world is a little bit mentally retarded. If a financial institution sheds a division because it doesn't fit, it gets a lot of criticism. If Novartis [of which Rudloff is vice-chairman] or Daimler-Benz refocuses itself, everybody cheers. A one-stop financial shop has all sorts of conflicts of interest."
Rudloff foresees Barclays Capital competing to finance acquisitions but not to win the acquisition mandates. "We won't have that internal conflict," he says. He expects harmony too with Barclays Capital's chief executive Bob Diamond who ran CSFB Asia when Rudloff was running London. "He's the man who brought me over," says Rudloff, who will keep his seat on various European boards and his chairmanship of Marcuard Group which owns Geneva private bank Marcuard & Co, a bank with family connections. At Barclays Capital, Rudloff, who has a reputation for round-the-clock living, will give advice and talk to clients but leave the sharp end to the executive committee: "After a heart operation [last year] I'm not going to mix it with 4,000 young and aggressive investment bankers as I used to." David Shirreff