Vedanta set to be fifth success for ‘Citizen Solider’ Hannam

Vedanta set to be fifth success for ‘Citizen Solider’ Hannam

Financial Times Jun 3-4 3006

The entry of Vedanta Resources into the blue chip club would be the fifth FTSE 100 success notched onto the belt of lan Hannam, the "citizen soldier" executive director at JPMorgan Cazenove, writes Robert Orr.

Mr Hannam, a tough SAS reservist who spent time working in the Gulf, is head of capital markets at JPMorgan and was in charge of the flotation of Vedanta in 2003 when Brian Gilbertson, former BHP Billiton chief executive, was chairman.

He was also behind last year's initial public offering of Kazakhyms, the miner that went straight into the blue chip index, while helping to build Xstrata into the FTSE 100 company it is today.

Before that, he organised the London listing of two South African companies, SABMiller and BHP Billiton.

Mr Hannam began his banking career on Wall Street with Salomon Brothers in the 1980s -at a time when John Meriwether ran the bond trading desk, a period made famous in the book Liar's Poker.

Back in London, he had a falling out with Salomon in 1991 after taking the blame for the disappointing float of Mirror Group Newspapers and joined Robert Fleming, the investment bank. There, he led the book-building exercise on what was at the time a significant £4.2bn placement of medical charity Wellcome Trust's holding in Wellcome, the drugs company.

When Fleming was bought by Chase Manhattan - just before the Chase merger with JPMorgan - Mr Hannam, then head of capital markets, was one of only a handful of Fleming executives to escape the axe.

More recently, he is credited as one of the architects of the "partnership" deal that helped meld JPMorgan's Wall Street culture with British institution Cazenove.