Macquarie Group hires Credit Suisse's top Australian dealmaker - memo

By Scott Murdoch

SYDNEY (Reuters) -Macquarie Group has hired Credit Suisse's top Australian dealmaker Dragi Ristevski, according to a memo from the bank.

Ristevski has been Credit Suisse's head of investment banking and capital markets. He will join Macquarie as the investment bank's head of financial sponsors for Asia Pacific, the memo said.

A Macquarie spokesman confirmed the contents of the memo.

Ristevski joined Credit Suisse in 2021 after spending 11 years at Citigroup where he earned a reputation as one of Australia's top private equity investment bankers.

He hired a number of senior bankers at Credit Suisse in an attempt to compete more aggressively alongside the bulge bracket firms in Australia.

In the memo, Macquarie Capital executive director Tim Joyce said Ristevski had advised high profile clients such as Bain, PEP, KKR, Quadrant and TPG on takeover deals in the region.

UBS last month agreed to buy Zurich rival Credit Suisse for 3 billion Swiss francs ($3.31 billion) in a deal engineered by the government, the central bank and market regulator to avoid a meltdown in the country's financial system.

The merged bank could reduce its workforce by 20% to 30%, Swiss media reported on April 2.

(Reporting by Scott Murdoch in Sydney; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Christopher Cushing)