The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board is restructuring its 15-member board and will have to elect two new securities-dealer representatives in the wake of the upheaval on Wall Street.
The board has moved Ronald Stack, the former head of public finance and managing director at Lehman Brothers, from a securities-dealer slot to an open bank-dealer seat yesterday, following Barclays Capital's purchase of Lehman's broker-dealer unit last week for $1.75 billion.
Barclays, a British-based bank, purchased the Lehman subsidiary after the 158-year old firm's holding company filed for bankruptcy early last week.
Stack, whose title is not changing at Barclays, is still slated to become the self-regulatory organization's new chairman on Wednesday, succeeding Frank Chin, managing director and manager of public finance at Citi.
Chin has said he will remain on the board, along with James Posthauer, director of municipal trading and underwriting at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey in Atlanta. The two were both elected to serve the remaining terms of two bank-dealers who left the board.
MSRB officials also said yesterday that Kevin Willens, managing director at Goldman, Sachs & Co., has left the board. Willens lost his securities-dealer seat after the Federal Reserve on Sunday night recognized Goldman as a bank holding company.
The 15-member board is made up of five securities firm officials, five bank officials, and five members of the public, including a representative of the investor community and a representative of issuers.
With Stack expected to remain in a bank-dealer slot, the board has six officials slated to fill five-bank dealer positions for the term that starts Wednesday, following the election of Martin Vogtsberger, managing director and head of institutional brokerage at Columbia, Ohio-based Fifth Third Securities.
MSRB executive director Lynnette Hotchkiss declined to say yesterday which one of the six will step down, and suggested that board members are still discussing the matter internally.
The board will also have to elect two new securities firm dealers, to fill the vacancies left by Stack and Willens.
