Buffeted by adverse market conditions and a crippling economic slowdown, Japan's largest brokerage and investment banking firm Nomura Holdings has abandoned plans to float an India-specific infrastructure fun, forcing the company to ask four very senior executives to quit the
firm.
Three of the executives were based out of India, while the fourth is based in the Singapore office of the Japanese financial advisory company, which acquired failed US-investment banking giant Lehman Brothers' Asia Pacific operations in September 2008.
An official spokesperson of Nomura declined to comment on the exit of the four director-level executives who were specifically hired two years ago to launch and manage a committed infrastructure fund in India.
"Nomura has decided to shelve its proposed plan to launch an infrastructure fund and therefore the people hired for the purpose have been asked to look for other opportunities," a source told HT on Thursday.
In the last 12 months several top-level executives have quit the company for various reasons including what some analysts have described the company's effort to merge the operations with the Wall Street icon that filed for bankruptcy in 2008, triggering the world economy's worst slowdown in eight decades.
About a year ago, two of Nomura's seniormost executives - Tarun Jotwani, global markets head and Jasjit "Jessi" Bhattal, wholesale banking unit chief - had quit the company. Both Bhattal and Jotwani were former Lehman Brothers executives, who had moved to Nomura.
While Nomura had absorbed 3,000 employees working in the erstwhile Lehman Brothers' operations in Mumbai, a source told HT that it has been a rocky marriage and there have been issues relating to "work culture."
A senior executive at Nomura, however, told HT that India continues to be a key market for the firm. "We were toying with the idea of launching an infrastructure fund, we had not launched it and we are not alone. There are several firms which have had to withdraw their expansion plans due to market conditions."
The official did not comment on whether the firm would reinitiate its plans to launch the fund once market conditions improve.