Deutsche’s M&A team battling for success after bumpy 2009

"Deutsche upturns the M&A order" ran the headline in the Asia news section of Euromoney’s August issue last year, as the bank beat out more established competitors to rank second on the Dealogic table for announced deals in the first half of 2009. New head of M&A Gordon Paterson, poached from Citi where he held the same role, had built up his small team with a series of good hires from competitors and the bank was seeing success by winning mandates on a few large deals. Key among those was the merger between South African telecoms provider MTN and India’s Bharti Airtel, in a deal that would have been worth more than $20 billion. The cancellation of that deal left a big hole in Deutsche Bank’s year-end M&A volume total for Asia, with the result that the bank finished a creditable but unexciting seventh on Dealogic’s 2009 table.