When McDonald’s closes its restaurants in Russia, that means that you can’t buy a Big Mac there (except on the black market).
The fast food franchise’s employees will not continue to work on complicated sales of McChicken Sandwiches that require months of negotiations and regulatory approvals. McDonald’s will no longer provide liquidity in the milkshake market.
In advisory and capital markets, it’s not so simple.
At the time of writing, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan were the only western investment banks to have made public statements about leaving the country. But it seems likely that all of the western investment banks are “winding down” their operations there, not just the ones that have said so.
This means not accepting new business. But banks have so far stopped short of abandoning mandates they were already working on, at least as this article was being written.
But it’s a fast moving situation, and as sanction bite, the banks’ decisions may end up being made for them. On Friday morning, the board of UK-listed mining and metals firm Evraz resigned after sanctions were imposed on the man who owns 29% of it, Roman Abramovich.
This does not bode well for the spin-off of the company’s metallurgical coal business, on which JP Morgan and Citi were working as financial advisers.
Private credit the place to be
If Russia is the market banks can’t get away from fast enough, the opposite seems to be the case for European private credit, where banks and asset managers are throwing as much resource as they can muster.
Morgan Stanley, for instance, is expected to make several senior hires in Europe in the coming months, having hired Arcmont Asset Management’s Mark Jochims in January.
The build-out at Morgan Stanley comes as Axa’s alternative investment arm announces record capital raise of €18bn, of which €8.3bn will be devoted to private debt and alternative credit.
Fortunately for hiring managers, there appears to be plenty of restless talent in the private credit world, following high profile departures from firms like Alcentra and ICG.
The recently launched revival of Salomon Brothers has already undergone a rebranding exercise and will now be known as Salomon Encore, reportedly because Citigroup refuses to give up the www.salomonbrothers.com domain.
A source at the new firm assures GlobalCapital that the new name does not imply any change to the business model and that “all of the Salomon Brothers names and legacy lives on”.
Indeed, the firm’s website, which has moved from its old home at www.salmonbrothers.net to www.salomonencore.com, still proclaims it to be “the modern Salomon Brothers” and the US Patent and Trademark Office shows no change in the status of the trademark.
A press release issued by the firm spins the rebrand in a positive light, saying it “reflects the firm’s desire to focus on the future while honouring and building upon Salomon Brothers’ venerable past as one of the world’s most established investment banking houses”.
But if the name change really is linked to Citi’s possession of the salomonbrothers.com domain name, there is some cause for optimism that its grip could be loosened.
Salomon Smith Barney, to which Citi is the legal successor, did not obtain the domain name until 2000 after a dispute with a so-called cybersquatter, Salomon Internet Services, which had registered it in 1996.
The World Intellectual Property Organization’s arbitration and mediation centre decided to transfer the domain to Salomon Smith Barney after the squatter provided false contact details and failed to convince the panel that it was making legitimate non-commercial use of the address.
Wipo noted Salmon Smith Barney’s ownership of the Salomon Brothers trademark and its use of the mark in commerce as important factors in its decision.
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