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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...