When a Wall Street law firm was asked to advise on investing in Hungary in 1989, it fell to Douglas Rediker, then a 30-year-old attorney, to do the research. "When we asked the opinion of a Hungarian lawyer," Rediker remembers, "we'd get back a hand written note saying: 'Dear Mr Rediker, It is okay to do what you ask.' It didn't give us a whole lot of comfort. On the other hand it was quite intriguing."
A bit bored with the law, Rediker, an easy-going native of Manhattan, headed to Budapest. He saw, in his words, "the opportunity to do well and to do good at the same time". He spent the next year starting up ventures ranging from laundromats to coffee shops. Then, after a spell on the political staff of Bill Clinton's first presidential election campaign, he was asked by Salomon Brothers to open an office in Hungary. "There weren't many of us then [in 1992] who knew the difference between debt and equity and had also spent a year in eastern Europe," he recalls.
Rediker has covered the region as an investment banker ever since. Now at Lehman Brothers, he is leading the team advising MediaOne on the sale of its wireless telecoms assets in central Europe. This, he says, will result in "by far the largest M&A deals this year in the region".
In the early days in Hungary with Salomon, Rediker's most notable coup was to act for the managers of telecom company Matav in the first major strategic privatization in the region: the sale to Ameritech and Deutsche Telekom for $870 million. The following year he moved to London as head of Salomon's central and eastern European investment banking business, while keeping an office and flat in Budapest. In his new capacity, Rediker worked on deals across the region, including the first equity offering of a Russian company (PLD Telekom) on the New York Stock Exchange.
Rediker moved to Merrill Lynch (following his wife, Heidi Crebo, who'd recently gone from Bankers Trust) at the end of 1995 to look after Merrill's telecom and media clients in emerging Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Over the course of the next year he oversaw the listing of Matav on the NYSE - it was the first company from the region to be listed there and the region's first billion dollar IPO. He also worked on the largest corporate high-yield debt offering, for Netia Telekom.
Rediker left Merrill last July and in September (again following in the footsteps of his wife) joined Lehman Brothers as the relationship manager responsible for the bank's investment banking clients in emerging Europe. He says Lehman's "relationship-banking" culture, suits him better than Merrill's "transaction-oriented" approach. "There are benefits to both," he admits. "But from a personal standpoint I try to look after my clients' interests through thick and thin. I've had some clients for seven years, and it can be tremendously fulfilling watching them grow. Merrill is a bigger operation and it needs more fuel for that machine to keep on moving, so it tends to do more deals. Lehman will do less deals but better deals - at least that's the idea."
"In emerging markets," Rediker says, "you need to be able to discern the better clients from the multitude that come to your door. Because if you're providing strategic advice you want to be able to give good advice and have good options. If you're just trying to raise money you want to make sure the company's worth raising money for. Lehman is more discriminating and in emerging markets in off times, you have to be pretty discriminating.
"Lehman's strategy is to target the deals we really want and leave the low-margin privatization business to others. We are not going to go in in size and when the markets get jittery pull out in size. When the rest of the banks were firing people in the fall of last year, we were hiring [people to cover emerging Europe]. Our approach was to not be exposed to things we didn't understand, to anticipate the risk, and to build slowly and steadily." Philip Eade