The Grim Reaper stalks investment bankers
BANKING is a tough business. The media spend hours debating whether you deserve your bonuses, regulators try to stop you doing anything remotely like what you’re meant to, and the hours are murder.
Now it also turns out that if you’re a banker, the Grim Reaper is often not far behind.
Two stories from different corners of the world rocked the banking fraternity this week.
First, tragedy struck the family of Investec’s UK-based investment banker, Gary Clarence. While he was back in South Africa, his wife, Tania, was arrested in a London suburb for the murder of their three disabled children — three-year-old twin sons, Ben and Max, and four-year-old daughter Olivia.
The three children are said to have suffered from spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic disorder that would have limited their lifespan.
On Friday, 42-year-old Tania Clarence appeared in a London court. Husband Gary is a law graduate, who completed his MBA in the Netherlands.
He joined Investec in 1999, and now specialises in deals in the healthcare sector.
A tragedy of a far different kind was being wrapped up on the other side of the world, where American expatriate Nancy Kissel failed in her last bid in a Hong Kong court to appeal against her life sentence for the “milkshake” murder of her Merrill Lynch banker husband this week.
Three judges rejected Kissel’s application — the end of a long legal road that began with her first conviction in 2005.
That 2003 murder gripped Hong Kong’s business and expatriate communities, bristling as it was with tales of domestic violence, rough sex and adultery that cast a shadow over the high-flying lifestyles of financial professionals in the former British colony.
Kissel was found guilty of murdering her husband after giving him a drug-laced milkshake, and then clubbing him to death with a metal ornament in their luxury home.
She was convicted for a second time in 2011, following a retrial. During her retrial, Kissel pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter, with her defence arguing that she suffered from depression, and had been provoked into the crime after years of sexual and physical abuse by her husband.
The Clarence tragedy is not the first to hit Investec’s London office.
Two years ago, Investec’s Nico Lambrechts leapt to his death from the trendy seventhfloor London restaurant Coq D’Argent, according to the UK’s Daily Mirror.
The newspaper reported that “the talented South Africanborn investment manager had been put under extreme stress after moving from investment bank Merrill Lynch to Investec” in July 2012, and was particularly worried about his planned move back to South Africa.
In February, Fortune magazine asked if there was a “suicide contagion” on Wall Street. This followed a spate of suicides at JP Morgan Chase, where workers had leapt to their deaths from the bank’s offices in Hong Kong and London.
“The rash of suicides has sent a shudder through Wall Street and beyond . . . yet the JP Morgan incidents are only the most recent in a string of at least a half-dozen suicides in the financial world since late August. Those include executives at Zurich Insurance Group, Deutsche Bank, and Russell Investments, among other firms,” he said.
“Out of all the sections of finance, no position do I know of that’s more extreme in terms of the emotional endurance one has to have than investment banking,” said one psychologist surveyed by Fortune. — Bloomberg