Justice Peter Kelly was left scratching his head on Monday following a routine application to the Commercial Court by a company called Htamretfa. Neither Mr Justice Kelly nor its barrister, John McCarroll, could pronounce the name, which sounds like a medical procedure.
"Who is the genius who came up with this?" Kelly asked McCarroll. His learned friend pleaded ignorance. It turns out the "genius" is sitting in the Dublin offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, which doesn't narrow it down much because sure aren't all stockbrokers conscious of their own genius?
Htamretfa is Aftermath spelled backwards. Its previous name was Dolmen Securities, the old holding company for the broker before it was bought by Cantor last December. Htamretfa's directors include former Dolmen executives Ronan Reid, Gerardine Jones and Paul McGowan. McGowan has moved on but Jones and Reid, now chief executive of Canor Fitzgerald Ireland, stayed on.
Cantor only bought one of the Dolmen subsidiaries, and Htamretfa needs court permission to reduce its share capital to dole out some of the sale proceeds to the ex-Dolmen execs. There is “a few million” in it, I hear. Apparently they wanted to rename it Nemlod (Dolmen backwards), but were warned off by a lawyer. For some reason, they settled on the unpronounceable. Why didn’t they just leave it at Aftermath? Who knows how the mind of a genius works ...
It's all go at Cantor these days. It is in the early stages of bedding in a new property team plucked from Lloyds, while I hear a new head of institutional equities is winging his way back home from Britain. A snout reckons it is Liam Boggan, formerly of Merrion stockbrokers. Other big name hires are in the pipeline.
Switching jobs is de rigeur at Dublin brokers these days. Across town at Investec, its head of wealth management Greg Dilger (brother of former Greencore boss David) is also leaving for pastures new "outside the industry". He's off the Ballybunion on his holidays today, too, the lucky ducker. Back at Cantor, I asked Reid who the genius was, but he only laughed and refused to spill. He always looked like a very smart fellow, did Ronan.
