VTB puts recruitment back on the cards

Financial News

Jason Corcoran in Moscow
14 May 2009

VTB Capital, the investment banking arm of Russia’s state-controlled VTB Bank, has put hiring back on the agenda, recruiting two senior sales executives from Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs after putting in place a recruitment freeze last year.

The bank has hired Andrey Yumatov from as Deutsche Bank as head of fixed income and deputy head of fixed income trading, while Michael Capone has joined from Goldman Sachs in Moscow as executive director of equity sales.

At the end of 2008, VTB introduced a hiring freeze across the group and a number of cost-cutting measures, including the postponement of the move to new headquarters and headcount reductions in some VTB businesses.

A Moscow spokeswoman for VTB Capital said the investment bank was hiring selectively and the move to its new offices in the emerging business district of Moscow City was back on the cards.

Yumatov was head of global debt capital markets and financial sales at Deutsche. He was previously a member of the board at UniCredit Bank supervising financial markets and investment banking services. Capone had been an executive director at Goldman Sachs since December 2007 and had also spent three years at Deutsche Bank in Moscow as a vice-president in equity sales.

VTB also recently boosted its research team by hiring Wiktor Bielski as global head of commodities research from Morgan Stanley, where he was head of European metals & mining research.

In late March, VTB took a 20% stake in Moscow brokerage Otkritie, on which it might now try to build. Data provide Dealogic last year ranked Otkritie ninth among the largest M&A advisers by volume of transactions in Russia and Eastern Europe. In 2008, the company advised on 49 deals worth of $12 bn in the region.

Yuri Soloviev, global chief executive of VTB Capital, said the investment bank had claimed a strong position in fixed income trading over the past year.

VTB Capital was launched in April last year as a full service investment bank and grew quickly to over 500 employees by the end of the year.

Its three main hubs operate from Moscow, London and Singapore while new sales and representative offices have been opened in Dubai and New York.