GE grows its levfi team

GE Commercial Finance is expanding its European leveraged finance and secondary markets teams with some more senior hires. Vivek Rattan and Simon White have joined the European leveraged finance team as managing director and executive director respectively, with Rattan concentrating on the large-cap market and White focusing on the mid-market.

Rattan joins GE Commercial Finance from Commerzbank, where he ran the leveraged finance division from 2000 to 2003. Prior to that he worked at Deutsche Bank as co-head of leveraged finance. That was after spending 10 years at Citicorp, where he held a number of positions including managing director, leveraged finance.

White joins from NM Rothschild, where he increased the profile of the London team in the LBO and corporate debt markets in a four-year spell culminating in running the debt arbitrage team. He was a member of the Rothschild credit committee and specialises in the mid-corporate buyout market.

These hires come after the appointment of Adam Hewson, who joined from UBS in December to head the European capital markets team. The secondary market team is being expanded further with more hires. Maurice Johnson has been appointed as managing director of secondary execution, and Nigel Houghton will join the business as executive director of sales and origination. Johnson and Houghton will both report to Neeraj Mehta, head of European secondary markets.

Johnson previously worked in GE’s capital markets team, structuring and syndicating leveraged loan transactions for both Europe and emerging markets. Prior to joining GE, he worked for Citibank’s project finance team across various markets in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Houghton will join the secondary markets team from Commerzbank, where he was head of secondary loan sales and trading (EMEA).

The secondary markets team invests in European bank loans, from distressed to par, as a stand-alone business.

“The Basle II initiatives and changes to German financial policy are helping to open up the market so there is plenty of growth potential,” said Mehta. “The European market has developed more recently than that of North America, so the outlook in Europe is good for future trading as the market expands to fulfil its potential.”