CIMB to retain most of Aussie staff after buyout

SYDNEY: CIMB Group Holdings Bhd plans to keep the majority of the 150 Australia-based staff currently employed in the divisions of Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS) that it seeks to acquire.

CIMB would eventually rebrand the RBS unit after it integrates the businesses, which included cash equities, equity capital markets, mergers and acquisitions advisory and corporate finance, Randolph Clinton, RBS’S head of equities for Australia, said in a phone interview from Sydney yesterday. He declined to comment on how many jobs would be lost in the units that CIMB isn’t buying.

“CIMB does not have operations here, so there is no overlap,” Clinton said. “We will take the lion’s share of the people across with us.”

CIMB chief executive officer Datuk Seri Nazir Razak is seeking to build a pan-asian financial-services provider after being Malaysia’s top underwriter for equity and rights offerings in the past three years. The lender, which has made acquisitions in Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia in the past seven years, this week said fourth-quarter profit surged 30% to a record on increased lending in Asia.

RBS has cut more than 30,000 jobs since receiving the world’s biggest banking bailout from the United Kingdom government.

Chief executive officer Stephen Hester last month posted a wider-than-estimated loss of £2bil (Us$3.2bil) for 2011 and is shrinking the bank’s balance sheet by selling assets abroad.

RBS said last month it planned to move its Australian fixed-income and currency trading business to Singapore and London.

Among senior RBS staff planning to join CIMB were Simon Perrott, chairman of the investment banking group, and Nicholas Rowe, managing director of investment banking, Clinton said. The two banks signed a memorandum of understanding yesterday, according to a filing with Bursa Malaysia.

The RBS units together employed as many as 600 workers across the Asia-pacific region, three people familiar with the talks said yesterday. – Bloomberg