BMO Capital Markets has hired Garth Salisbury as the managing director of its public finance group's energy and infrastructure banking team.
Salisbury will be in BMO's San Francisco office. He jumped to BMO from RBC Capital Markets, where he had been a managing director.
"BMO has had a tremendous amount of success in the Midwest, and on the west coast as well," Salisbury said. "The California market in particular is the area I will be focused on."
Salisbury said that he first became acquainted with BMO's public finance group because of Ed Meyers, the head of BMO's utility group who Salisbury had known for about 20 years.
"Over time, when you compete with someone in the industry, you can grow to respect them, and I certainly did so with Ed Meyers over the years," Salisbury said. "He had a very good group of people in the public finance business at BMO, and they had needs on the west coast for which I saw as a good fit."
Salisbury has helped clients in power and water utilities and western region infrastructure develop financing strategies. He has investment banking experience with non-public power opportunities including natural gas prepayments, alternative energy projects, water utilities and general government issuers.
"BMO has senior managed over $3.5 billion of public power bonds in the last four years or so, and co-managed over $22 billion," Salisbury said. "In the utility space, that's a very strong resume."
BMO's public finance team consists of two bankers including Salisbury, based in San Francisco. It also has Ed Meyers and two other bankers in the utility group based in New York. BMO currently has one office on the west coast in San Francisco for public finance.
"I'm going to help build BMO's utility practice on the west coast," Salisbury said.
During his career Salisbury has structured over $35 billion of debt financings as senior book-running manager including the $11.3 billion California Department of Water Resources Energy Purchase Programs during the California energy crisis, a spokeswoman for BMO said in an emailed statement.
Salisbury had worked at RBC for six years before coming to BMO, and also spent 17 years at JPMorgan, where he managed the western regional public finance banking team and Lehman Brothers.
He officially started at BMO on Feb. 24.
