Three investment bankers are leaving the remnants of Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc. to open a Chicago office next month for Wall Street investment banking boutique Greenhill & Co.
Glenn Tilles, a 34-year Lehman veteran, says he and colleagues Doug Jackson and Chris Roehm will form an industrial-oriented practice for Greenhill and eventually hire additional bankers.
Greenhill, founded in 1996 by former Morgan Stanley Group Inc. President Robert Greenhill, had no immediate comment. Mr. Tilles says the firm is searching for space in the Loop’s financial district. At Lehman, Mr. Tilles, 60, advised Chicago Mercantile Exchange Holdings Inc. on several transactions, notably the 2007 merger with CBOT Holdings Inc. that produced CME Group Inc. Lehman’s Chicago office also advised Alcoa Inc.’s $2.8-billion divestiture of its packaging and consumer products business this year.
Greenhill’s work is primarily advisory, counseling corporate clients like Delta Air Lines in its just-completed merger with Northwest Airlines and the board of Wendy’s International Inc. during merger talks with Arby’s owner Triarc Cos. Greenhill eschews riskier capital-markets activities like lending, trading and underwriting.
“We don’t have to worry about being wiped out on the capital side of the business as, frankly, we were in the old Lehman Bros.,” Mr. Tilles says.
Greenhill nevertheless is hardly immune from market turmoil. It lost $11.7 million during the three months ended in September, causing a 57% decline in net income — to $36.4 million — for the first nine months of 2008. Greenhill blamed a drop in advisory fee revenue from fewer completed deals and a decline in the value of energy investments.
Last month it opened an office in Tokyo, its seventh.
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