Senior Morgan Stanley banker Donald Moore to retire - memo

By Anjuli Davies

LONDON (Reuters) - Senior Morgan Stanley (MS.N) banker Donald Moore will retire from the Wall Street bank at the end of the year, according to a memo seen by Reuters on Tuesday.

Moore, a 65-year-old American native, spent 41 years at the firm, most recently as chairman of the Global Financial Institutions Group (FIG) based in London.

A spokesman for Morgan Stanley in London confirmed the contents of the memo.

Moore joined the Wall Street bank in New York in 1975 and worked his way up to head of the global FIG group from 1986 to 1997, a period during which he advised on 120 equity and M&A transactions in the banking industry, according to the memo.

In 1997, he moved to London as vice chairman of Morgan Stanley, where he was involved in over 500 billion euros (£446.29 billion) worth of transactions, including spearheading a 5.5 billion euro rescue rights issue for French Bank Societe Generale in the wake of the Jerome Kerviel trading scandal in 2008.

"Donald has been the embodiment of doing first class business in a first class way, and has been a role model and mentor for an entire generation of investment bankers at Morgan Stanley," Morgan Stanley President Colm Kelleher and global co-heads of investment banking Franck Petitgas and Mark Eichorn said jointly in the memo.

(Reporting by Anjuli Davies, editing by Kirstin Ridley)