Barclays Japan Investment Banking Head Said to Leave

Barclay Plc’s co-head of investment banking in Japan, Hideaki Sunaga, is leaving after about a year with the firm, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

It isn’t clear exactly when Sunaga, a former head of European investment banking at Nomura Holdings Inc., will leave Barclays, said one of the people, who declined to be identified as no public announcement has been made.

Barclays, which bought Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s U.S. operations in 2008, hired Sunaga in January last year as part of a push to expand in Japan, where Citigroup Inc. and UBS AG were shedding jobs. Sunaga said in a March 2009 interview that Barclays aimed to double its local investment-banking workforce to 80 people over two years.

“Japan is a treasure-trove,” Sunaga, 48, said at the time. “The incentive for Japanese companies to buy foreign assets is getting stronger as the prolonged financial turmoil pushes asset prices lower.”

Mariko Hayashibara, a Tokyo-based spokeswoman at Barclays, declined to comment. Sunaga didn’t pick up calls to his office phone seeking comment.

Sunaga joined Barclays as a managing director in charge of corporate finance and merger advisory in Japan, according to a Jan. 9, 2009, company statement. He shares the title of co-head of local investment banking with Takemi Ando and reports to Hong Kong-based Matthew Ginsburg, a former Morgan Stanley banker who joined Barclays in September as head of investment banking for Asia Pacific.

Sumitomo Mitsui Sale

Barclays is the third-biggest underwriter of Japanese equity and equity-linked transactions this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. It helped Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc. raise about 970 billion yen ($10.8 billion) selling common stock in January.

During the more than two decades he worked at Nomura, Sunaga advised Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. on its takeover of a building materials and electrical appliances affiliate in 2004 and helped the firm underwrite a global equity offering for East Japan Railway Co. in 2002.

Barclays has hired about 100 people in Japan since October 2008, mainly former Lehman employees, building its equity and research sales team there even as UBS, HSBC Holdings Plc and Citigroup retrenched in the world’s second-largest economy.