Kerr's people: Bruno Gabriele

Abstract

To push Lehman Brothers into the premier division of European investment banking, merger and acquisition, corporate finance, and advisory work, the firm needed new faces. Dan Tyree, hired from Salomon Brothers, worked well for Lehman. Bruno Gabriele must have been an obvious choice for anyone seeking to raid Salomon Brothers in London. Gabriele has ideal qualifications for being a banker's investment banker. He is co-head of investment banking in Europe.

Co-head, investment banking Europe, Lehman Brothers International

Was it simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time? This is the question friends and competitors asked when Bruno Gabriele, barely six weeks into a new highprofile career at Lehman Brothers, moved even higher to be co-head of all the firms European investment banking operations.

Lehman's record in Europe had been spotty - remember the mass firings in the late 1980s, and more recently, the closure of the branch in Lugano and high staff turnover in Geneva? It put itself back on track then by hiring a Salomon man - in the unmistakable and harddriving Dan Tyree, now CEO of Lehman in Asia. However, the turnaround in fixed income and international equities moved faster than in European investment banking and corporate finance. When Lehman lost the feisty Bill Harrison to Robert Fleming, it lost one of its major deal-makers. Steve Berger who then took over the firm's European investment banking simply didn't have Harrison's presence or his formidable list of corporate clients, especially in the UK.

To push Lehman into the premier division of European investment banking, M&A, corporate finance and advisory work, the firm needed some new faces. Tyree had worked well for Lehman. Why not look at Salomon again to recruit a top investment banker, or better still, a group of investment bankers? Ideal qualifications

Bruno Gabriele must have been an obvious choice for anyone seeking to raid Salomon Brothers in London. Then only 35, but already a managing director, he was the moving force on the international side of Salomon's financial institutions group. When Salomon lost its way in the aftermath of the I99I treasury auction scandal, and then again in I994, the reputation of the financial institutions group remained totally unblemished. In this specialist sector, where business was booming and the firm's equity research was still among the best, Salomon was perhaps the first call for raising capital and advisory work.

Gabriele has ideal qualifications for being a banker's investment banker. His father was a senior international executive with Banca di Roma for 35 years. He started, like so many others who have shot up the ladder, with Citicorp where he worked for six years before joining Salomon in I986. Salomon's bankers in the financial institutions group, including Kenny Wilson, Dick Barrett, Bob Nan and Gerry Smith, had built up excellent relationships with the money centre banks and other core clients including Republic National Bank. There was also plenty of business in continental Europe. Gabriele worked on some major transactions, including the privatization of Compagnie Financiere de Suez, the bankinsurance joint venture between AXA and BBV, and the rescue and subsequent sale of Banesto to Banco Santander. There were also smaller but personally satisfying transactions such as the purchase, and the sale six years later, of Banca Steinhauslin (a small private bank in Florence) on behalf of Creditanstalt - "the only bank I bought and sold on behalf of the same client," recalls Gabriele.

Why leave Salomon for Lehman? By I995 Salomon was beginning to get itself out of a trough, but Gabriele found himself at odds with the firm's investment banking strategy and he admits: "I had stopped having fun."

When Gabriele answered Lehman's call, he immediately took four senior Salomon colleagues with him - Thomas Marsoner, Antonio Villalon, Nick Lyons and Martin Dolan. Like the Pied Piper he attracted a total of zo Solly employees, including five executive directors, two directors, nine associates and two analysts.

Did Gabriele expect to be promoted to cohead of all European investment banking within weeks of his arrival at Lehman? "Certainly not," he asserts. But, as Lehman might have hoped, there is a new resolve about the firm's investment banking efforts in Europe and in other areas such as Israel, where Lehman is a major force. Specifically, Lynch and Gabriele are targeting European telecom and media, energy and utilities, financial institutions and health-care. And equity research, an area where Lehman's commitment in Europe has often seemed half-hearted, is no longer neglected. In the last six months, Lehman has been on a buying spree recruiting analysts from CSFB, Robert Fleming, Gencor, Merrill Lynch and, of course, Salomon.

Gabriele himself remains firmly in the front line working with Cariplo (a former client of Salomon) and on Lehman's defence assignments for Banca Popolare di Novara, and is determined to extend the firm's investment banking successes in Italy to Spain, Portugal and France.