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Reuters – One of London’s top analysts, James Montier, has resigned from French bank Societe Generale to join a hedge fund, a source with knowledge of the situation said on Thursday.
The source did not say which hedge fund has employed Montier, recently voted best strategist in the Thomson Extel survey, alongside colleague Albert Edwards.
The pair joined Societe Generale from Dresdner Kleinwort in December 2007 as co-heads of global strategy.
Wall Street Journal – Some numbers are so big you just have to stand back and admire them. An investment banker claiming $550 million of fees in a single year is just such a number.
The number is staggering for an industry in which a great year means an investment banker brought in $25 million in fees and $40 million of fees makes a Wall Streeter a star.
Then there is Merrill Lynch banker Andrea Orcel laying claim to bringing in more than 13 times that for his firm, or $550 million in fees, according to this Wall Street Journal article by our colleague Susanne Craig. That earned Orcel a 2008 bonus of $33.6 million–down just a smidge from the $38 million he received in the M&A boom year of 2007.
Investment bankers’ bonuses are based in large part on the credit the individual bankers claim for the deals they worked on. As today’s Page One Journal article notes, Orcel won a big one-time bonus of $12 million in 2007 just for advising the Royal Bank of Scotland Group-led $101 billion acquisition of Dutch bank ABN Amro.
Bloomberg – Martin Ward, a teacher at a London experimental school called the Evelyn Grace Academy, is pitching Arpad Busson on a new idea for getting poor kids interested in science. The charity that Busson leads, Absolute Return for Kids, or ARK, is a sponsor of Evelyn Grace to the tune of 2 million pounds.
Ward wants to buy a used ice-cream truck and turn it into a mobile science lab so that kids at cash-strapped schools around London can do hands-on experiments. Busson, who runs fund-of- hedge-funds firm EIM SA, asks a few questions and confers with a colleague. “It’s done,” he says. “You’ve got it. We’ve found the money.”
