News in brief

• Rutland Partners, the UK private equity partnership, announces that Daniel Freed has joined the investment team. Daniel joins Rutland after spending three years at CIBC World Markets where he worked on European M&A transactions across a wide range of sectors prior to which he worked in the corporate finance department of Ernst & Young advising clients in the TMT sector. Rutland now has nine investment professionals focusing on its niche of investing in UK companies where it can actively engage to address underperformance, the need to restructure or to assist with strategic change.

• Bank of America has hired Alessandro Mele to its global ABS team for the EMEA region. Alessandro will be responsible for expanding BofA’s franchise in Continental Europe. He joins from HVB. Also joining the firm are Scott Littlejohn and David Adler, who will both join the financial institutions investment banking group in June. Littlejohn will be head of insurance while Adler will focus on M&A. Both will be based in New York and report to Tony Ursano, global head of the FIG group.

• Bank of Ireland has appointed Christophe Tardy as director, leveraged syndicated finance. Tardy will join Bank of Ireland in early July and will be based in London. He previously spent 15 years at Societe Generale, becoming part of the European syndicated finance team in 2001. Prior to that he spent three years in leveraged finance origination, based in Paris.

• Stuart Aylward has joined Wachovia Securities International in London as a director on the European debt syndicate and debt capital markets desk, reporting to Bryant Owens, managing director and head of the group. Aylward will focus on debt origination coverage of financial institutions in Europe. Prior to joining Wachovia, Aylward spent eight years at WestLB, most recently as executive director, financial institutions origination.

• Iceland’s Baugur Group has announced that Don McCarthy, House of Fraser’s chairman and major shareholder, is buying approximately 3% of Baugur, which has about £2bn worth of assets under management. McCarthy has also accepted a non-executive director position on Baugur’s board, as well as board positions in the Group’s Danish department store investments, Magasin du Nord and Illum.

• Sven Weber joins Cipio Partners from Innovature Capital Partners (ICP) where he worked on several major secondary direct transactions. He brings to Cipio Partners more than 14 years of experience as an entrepreneur and investor in IT, communications and media. Prior to his tenure with ICP, Weber was Vice President at a unit of global technology group Siemens, responsible for US early stage, communications-related investments. Currently, Cipio Partners manages a portfolio of investments of more than 50 companies in software, semiconductor, communications and new media, in the US, Europe, Israel and Asia.