| Adebayo Ogunlesi | ||||||
Let’s hope John Mack is not too downhearted at his failure to lure his old friend Walid Chammah away from Morgan Stanley. It would appear to be the first setback the chief executive of CSFB has had since replacing Allen Wheat last July.
Instead, he should be looking at it as marking a refreshing change in the fortunes of the investment bank: usually it’s CSFB’s executives who have to spend days convincing bankers not to leave, accompanied by the liberal use of the company cheque book. Last year Wheat spent $300 million securing the loyalty of 40 members of his US bond group who had resigned to join Barclays Capital.
Those days appear to be gone, replaced by a new sense of loyalty. Of course, a severe economic downturn helps, as does the knowledge that Mack won’t stand for any monkey business.
He’s persuaded most of those on boom-time deals to renegotiate them and selectively hired a few individuals to senior roles. Chammah was part of that plan, and that Mack was after him surprised few. What was a surprise was that it was only last month that he made his play.
Perhaps it’s because he had to find the right role for him. There was no space in his field – he’s head of debt capital markets at Morgan Stanley, and CSFB has a tightly-knit group that would not appreciate a new leader. The investment-banking role came up when one of the global co-heads, Charles Ward, left for Lazard.
Mack decided it was an opportunity to bring in new faces, so Ward’s fellow co-head, Tony James, was bumped upstairs to the new role of chairman of investment banking and private equity.
The plan was to make Chammah co-head with Adebayo Ogunlesi, head of CSFB’s energy banking group. Once Chammah turned the job down, Mack decided not to continue the search, so instead Ogunlesi has the job all to himself.
He’s worked for CSFB since 1983, steered the project-finance group through a difficult merger of the investment bank’s and commercial bank’s two divisions in the mid-1990s, and is responsible for making CSFB a top project finance houses. He is well respected and has an eye for profitability and best use of the bank’s balance sheet.
The big question now is whether he’s going to take his table ice hockey game with him when he moves up to his new office on the 20th floor. He had it installed outside his old office during the dot com boom of the late 1990s.
