In a move to beef up its leveraged finance operations, Merrill Lynch & Co. shuffled senior personnel in its high-yield, bank loan, and private equity operations last week.
"The idea is to grow the effort and expand internationally," said a Merrill Lynch spokesman, adding that the firm is "still hashing it out."
At the top of the leveraged finance group, Kevin Cox will be joined by Mark Maybell as co-head. Mr. Maybell, a managing director, is also co-head of Merrill's global communications investment banking unit.
Merrill's top-ranked high-yield bond origination unit will be headed by Chris Johnson, the former co-head who left briefly to work in the firm's equity capital markets group.
The high-yield shop moved up one spot on the league tables last year to become second among lead-managers behind Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. Merrill led 25 junk issues, totaling $4.3 billion, according to Securities Data Corp.
Michael Senft, who formerly co-headed the junk bond shop, remains a managing director and senior banker in the group. And Robert Kramer returns to the high-yield unit as a managing director after a six-month stint as senior vice president of finance for NextWave Telecom Inc.
John F. Yang and Christopher Birosak remain at the helm of Merrill's three-year-old bank loan operation, which agented more than $5 billion of syndicated loans last year. It is focused on leveraged and highly leveraged transactions. Of the 16 loans Merrill led last year, 14 were highly leveraged.
Although it didn't make the ranks of the top 25 syndicated lenders last year, Merrill was ranked 20th in the 1996 leveraged league tables for loans priced at 150 or more basis points over the London interbank offered rate.
Merrill also landed in 13th spot on the league table for highly leveraged lending, which tracks loans priced at 250 basis points over Libor and up, according to Loan Pricing Corp.
This year began well for Mr. Yang's lending operation, which snatched a $125 million syndication for Imco Recycling Inc. from Texas Commerce Bank, a unit of Chase Manhattan Corp.
