Citi India has added eight people at managing director and director level in the last six months, boosting the strength of its equities business.
The business is growing under the watch of Nikhil Nagle who was appointed to head Citi's India equities platform early last year. Citi veteran Nagle moved from Hong Kong, where he led Citi's South Asian trading desk, to Mumbai to take on his new assignment.
"India is a high-priority market for the Asia-Pacific region and with these new appointments Citi is confident of continuing to be amongst the leading equities franchises in India, supporting our clients' needs across the market," said Nagle in a written statement formally announcing the hires. The new hires take the total team strength of Citi's India equities business to 25. All the hires report to Nagle.
Citi's most recent hire, Keshav Sanghi, joined late last month as deputy to Nagle with the rank of managing director (MD). He was most recently chief executive officer at Reliance Equities International, a firm set up by the Anil Ambani arm of the Reliance group in 2008 to complement the domestic financial services firm Reliance Capital. Sanghi was poached from Deutsche Bank by Reliance Equities. At Citi he will be primarily responsible for building relationships with Citi's investor clients.
Sanghi takes to four the number of MDs Citi has in its equities group, including Nagle. FinanceAsia reported in October that Richard Macfarlane had joined Citi at MD level to head execution services. He was most recently at HSBC private bank in Singapore but has also worked at UBS. Soon after Macfarlane came on board, Vandana Luthra joined from Merrill Lynch in equity sales, also at MD level, to cover primarily offshore accounts.
The US bank has also added five directors to the equities team. Chandra Sekaran moved along with his earlier boss from Reliance Equities International and joined Citi on January 14. Sekaran has been hired as a director in equity sales trading. He has trading experience across Kotak, J.P. Morgan, Deutsche and Franklin Templeton.
Citi also made four director-level appointments in its equities team through the latter part of 2009. Abhijit Attavar joined in India trading. He was earlier the head of research for small and mid-market capitalisation companies at ABN AMRO. Andrew Sutcliffe, who was earlier in institutional sales trading at Nomura, joined Citi in sales trading. Abhinav Khanna joined in equity sales from Macquarie, where he was in a similar role. Suveer Chainani also joined the equity sales team from Macquarie, where he was part of the Indian equities team.
