Christopher Street Capital, the London-based fixed-income agency broker, has hired Edward Cahill, former European head of CDOs at Barclays Capital, to run its structured credit brokerage business.
Cahill achieved notoriety in mid-2007 with the collapse of a series of SIV-lite structured credit vehicles originated by BarCap. The deals were among the first victims of the credit crunch and a forerunner of the entire collapse of the SIV market.
The hire is part of Christopher Street’s strategy to focus on the more opaque parts of the credit markets after bid-offer spreads across the fixed income narrowed during 2009 as market conditions improved. This time last year a large number of agency brokerages entered the European market as spreads widened and major market makers withdrew liquidity.
“We want to focus on areas of the market where people have a problem with execution,” says Iain Baillie, who heads up Christopher Street. “Owners of structured credit want to go to people who have the ability to drill down into what they own, where the risk is, and what they should do with it.”
The agency broker has also made a string of other key hires, including Karl Prazmo, another former Barclays employee, James Hart, formerly at private equity firm Fortress Investment Group, to concentrate on residential and commercial mortgage-backed securities; Tony Maude, the former head of UK credit sales at Dresdner Kleinwort; Javier Benavides previously from HSBC, to cover institutions in Spain and Iberia; and Ulrich Neuhauss, another former Dresdner employee and Wladimir Ledochowski from Merrill Lynch, to cover the German-speaking regions of Europe.