In brief

• SVG Capital has appointed Lynn Fordham as CEO of SVG Capital plc and Tony Dalwood as CEO of SVG Advisers with immediate effect. Fordham joined the SVG Capital Board as Finance Director in July 2008. Dalwood joined SVG Advisers in 2002 as Head of Public Equities. With these appointments, Nicholas Ferguson will relinquish his interim executive role and will revert to his position of Chairman of SVG Capital.

• Perella Weinberg Partners has announced the expansion of the firm’s restructuring group with the additions of Richard Shinder and Agnes Tang. Shinder, who joins the firm as a Managing Director, has over 15 years of restructuring and distressed investing experience. He joins Perella Weinberg Partners from Goldman Sachs, where he was a senior member and founder of Distressed Principal Investing in the Americas Special Situations Group. Prior to that, he spent 10 years as a restructuring advisor, primarily as a Managing Director in Blackstone’s Restructuring and Reorganization Advisory Group. Tang, who joins Perella Weinberg Partners as a director, has over 10 years of investment banking and management consulting experience, most recently as a senior member of Houlihan Lokey’s Financial Restructuring Group where she spent seven years focused on restructuring transactions representing both companies and creditors across a variety of industries. Perella Weinberg Partners’ financial restructuring group was formed in January 2007 when the firm acquired the business of Kramer Capital Partners. The firm now has over 80 financial professionals actively engaged in various restructuring and corporate finance transactions and advisory work in both the United States and Europe.

• Barclays Capital has hired Mark Warham and Matthew Ponsonby as co-heads of mergers and acquisitions in Europe as it expands its investment banking franchise in Europe and Asia after buying Lehman Brothers’s North American unit. Ponsonby is one of the world’s leading utilities and infrastructure advisers – and M&A bankers do not rise much higher than Warham, who climbed Mount Everest a decade ago and retains a passion for mountaineering. Warham, most recently chairman of UK investment banking and head of UK M&A at Morgan Stanley, and former director general of the UK’s Takeover Panel, and Ponsonby, global co-head of infrastructure investment banking at Citigroup, will both be based in London and are expected to start at the beginning of September. BarCap has grown its M&A franchise hugely over the past year. The firm is building on its existing client relationships with corporates and financial sponsors in Europe and globally to establish a dedicated M&A business in these lean times. According to Paul Parker, the New York-based head of global M&A at Barclays and an ex-Lehman banker, the build-out of the European business is a crucial part of its ambitions. With Ponsonby and Warham in place, the firm will also be adding about 60 or so M&A bankers in Europe, including up to 25 in the UK. The Asian team of 20 is also likely to double. “With the US team in place from Lehman and the emerging markets team from ABN, the key piece that we were missing in M&A was Western Europe,” said Parker. “If anyone had any questions about where we were going, these hires answer them with an exclamation mark. Having developed our sector teams, this stage now gives us the connectivity and execution expertise that we need.”