LGT hires Merrill’s Middle East wealth chief

LGT Group, the Liechtenstein-based private bank, has hired Tamer Rashad from Bank of America Merrill Lynch to run its newly-established wealth management business in the Middle East, it said in a statement Wednesday.

Rashad was most recently a managing director and head of BofA Merrill's Middle East wealth management business. In the new role he will report to Thomas Piske, chief executive of LGT Private Banking, the statement said.

Reuters reported in April that BofA had put its wealth management unit outside the United States up for sale as the business, which manages $90 billion for rich clients, was not large enough to generate sufficient income.

LGT, which managed assets worth $91 billion at end-2011, is setting up its operations in Dubai, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters in June.

The bank has hired at least six private bankers from Swiss rival Clariden Leu for the business, the sources had said at the time.

LGT will also cover the non-resident Indian population from the region and countries in the Indian subcontinent, a business which will be headed by Mannan Adenwalla, previously Clariden's managing director in Dubai.

LGT's operations will be based in the tax-free Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), home to most global banks in the region.

The region's private banking sector has several pure-play private banks like Julius Baer and Sarasin Alpen, competing with diversified banks such as Credit Suisse, JP Morgan Chase and UBS.

The wealth management industry in the Middle East and Africa could see overall assets under management grow to $6.7 trillion by 2015, helped by high oil prices, a study by the Boston Consulting Group in June last year showed.

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