But United Financial Group, the Moscow-based investment bank headed by U.S. banker Charles Ryan and former Russian deputy prime minister Boris Federov, remains upbeat about the prospects for its new office in London - the firm’s first outside Russia.
Paul Swigart, a former Latin America analyst who will run the new operation along with the firm’s chief strategist, Christopher Granville, says the new outpost will put United much closer to major emerging-markets investors, particularly those focused on Eastern European economies. Most of the firm’s initial efforts will consist of advising portfolio managers. “In the U.K. you can easily have 25 investor meetings in four days,” whereas in other major financial centers, like New York, even before the recent terrorist attacks, “you’d be challenged to have 12 to 15,” says Swigart.
What’s more, President Vladimir Putin’s decisive move to align himself with the U.S. in the war on terrorism should improve the country’s geopolitical standing as well as its prospects for foreign investment. “That can’t help but strengthen Putin’s hand with respect to Chechnya and the WTO,” explains Swigart. Russia’s stock market was up nearly 26 percent this year through September.
Besides, like many emerging-markets professionals, Swigart is used to uncertainty. He departed United’s Moscow office in 1997, shortly before the Russian crisis broke, and after a brief stint at another money manager, joined Zurich Scudder in New York. He left just as that firm was slated to be sold to Deutsche Bank (see story, page 50), while the Argentinean debt negotiation was depressing the Latin American markets. “My entire career has been full of crises,” says the 31-year-old analyst. United has had its own share of setbacks. The firm had planned to open a New York office in 1998, but Russia’s debt default nixed that idea.
