WASHINGTON — Ronald Stack is leaving Barclays Capital to join Wells Fargo & Co., where he will head the northeast group in their public finance department, sources said.
Stack, who is chairman of the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board this year, has been a managing director at Barclays and head of the firm’s New York state underwriting business since last fall after Lehman Brothers collapsed and Barclays bought its North American sales, trading, research, and investment banking businesses.
Wells Fargo last year agreed to acquire Wachovia Corp. and is currently absorbing its businesses. Both firms’ broker-dealer units — Wells Fargo Brokerage Services LLC and Wachovia Securities LLC — had been expanding their municipal groups into certain regions before the acquisition and together plan to be a top 10 firm.
Neither Stack nor a Wells Fargo spokeswoman could be reached for comment. A Barclays spokeswoman declined to comment. But a market source said that Stack resigned from Barclays within the past week or two and is in a transitory “garden leave” period where he is still technically an employee of Barclays but is unable to talk to clients, sources said.
His job switch is unlikely to alter the composition of the MSRB. The self-regulator has 15 members on its board, which is made up of five bank dealers, five securities dealers, and five “public” members, and his new job at Wells Fargo would not put him in a different category on the board. He would still fill the slot of a bank representative. He is to remain chairman through Sept. 30.
MSRB general counsel Ernesto Lanza said that the board does not comment on individual members’ employment status. But he noted that several board members have changed positions in the past and it has not been a problem when they have stayed in the same board-seat category.
