Samuel A. Ramirez & Co. has continued the expansion of its municipal business, adding three public finance bankers and a three-person municipal sales team.
Ramirez, which was founded in 1971 and is based in New York, hired Afredo Quintero, Richard Allen, and Nadine Mentor to work in the municipal finance group.
The company also hired Ronald Banaszek as sales manager, and Peter Koch and Timothy Houston as vice presidents. The three were a team at UBS.Quintero will work as a managing director out of the New York office.
Quintero go this start in public finance at Merrill in 1984. He has spent most of his career working with issuers in the Northeast.
“I am pleased to be a part of the team as we continue to build our banking business throughout these regions and structure deals for our clients,” Quintero said in a statement.
Allen will run the Michigan region and school district business. He has worked on school finance since the early 1980s. Allen worked at Bear Stearns until 2007, and after that worked at UBS.
He has been chairman of a consulting firm that advised municipalities in Michigan, directed the muni consulting department of Michigan National Bank, and worked as deputy director of the Municipal Finance Commission in the Michigan Department of Treasury.
Mentor was named senior vice president and will run the Florida and Southeast regions for Ramirez.
Mentor began her career in public finance in 2002, as an associate at UBS covering issuers in the Northeast. She moved to Florida in 2005 and joined Citigroup.
The three new bankers will report to Ted Sobel, head of public finance at Ramirez. The three sales people will report to chief operating officer Dan Keating.
Ramirez has seven divisions, including a municipal finance division. The public finance business ranked 21st in underwritings last year, running $2.71 billion in deals, according to Thomson Reuters. It ranks 25th so far in 2010.
Ramirez has been expanding since the financial crisis, beefing up its regional offices and hiring people displaced from the major Wall Street firms by the financial crisis.
