Swiss pot

Jefferies: Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. After building up its US business over the past decade by poaching top banking teams from rivals, UBS isn’t taking lightly to any copycatting. The Swiss bank this week filed an arbitration claim accusing Jefferies & Co of snatching away three dozen bankers focusing on the healthcare industry.

The irony of the Jefferies swoop, and the response from UBS, was not lost on Wall Street. Indeed, the executive leading the move – which UBS said constitutes a “nearly complete lift-out” of its healthcare practice – is none other than Benjamin Lorello. The former Citigroup Smith Barney banker transported his team to UBS in 1999, kicking off UBS’s last big build-up on Wall Street.

Though the bank had already bought Dillon Read and the PaineWebber brokerage, it started to pick off some of the top banking names, along with their teams, just as many of their employers were reeling from the dotcom crash. Among them, it hired Ken Moelis from Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette as it was being subsumed by Credit Suisse – and on a reported $60m three-year contract to boot.

The shoe is now on the other foot. Few European banks have suffered as mightily as UBS over the past couple years. While it says it remains committed to the banking business, it has had to cut back dramatically and was the first to institute a bonus scheme in which bankers would suffer clawbacks for deals that went awry.

So it’s only fitting that the banker whose arrival a decade ago marked UBS’s charge into the US is the one to leap with the biggest gaggle of talent to an up-and-coming firm. Of course, that’s not the only irony. According to a 2003 New York Times article, Lorello once called his new employer “a low quality firm.” As ever, the lesson on Wall Street is that money holds no grudges.