Morning Coffee: Morgan Stanley's London chairman missing after freak sinking. Barclays under pressure to cut salaries

Jonathan Bloomer wasn't a chairman of Morgan Stanley International in the investment banking sense of the word. He was a chairman of Morgan Stanley International in the standard sense of the word: Bloomer has chaired Morgan Stanley's London board of directors since 2016 as part of a portfolio of non-executive director roles. Now, Morgan Stanley may sadly need to find someone else. 

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Bloomer is among those missing after the freak sinking of the yacht belonging to acquitted UK technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch. Lynch is also missing, along with his 18-year-old daughter, a Clifford Chance Lawyer, five other guests and one crew member. 

The sinking of Lynch's yacht off the coast of Sicily over 24 hours ago appears to have been the result of a whirling column of air and mist like a tornado, which struck the yacht at 4am. Another boat nearby was unaffected by the waterspout. 

Three months ago, Lynch was exonerated of fraudulent accounting before Autonomy was sold to Hewlett Packard in 2011. His fellow defendant Stephen Chamberlain was also exonerated and died at the weekend after being struck by a car while jogging. 

Others on the boat included Charlotte Golunski, an associate at Lynch's VC firm Invoke Capital. Golunski was there with her baby daughter and escaped on a lifeboat. “I held her afloat with all my strength, my arms stretched upwards to keep her from drowning," Golunski said.  

Bloomer wasn't a banker, and so Lynch wasn't a client. The two and others were on the yacht to seemingly celebrate Lynch's exoneration from the fraud charges in June. Bloomer was a previous chair of Autonomy's audit committee, and his testimony to the effect that Lynch was "more interested in the strategy, new products, new areas to look at, potential acquisitions," than accounting was critical to Lynch's successful defence. 

In the early 2000s, Bloomer was chief executive of Prudential, but was ousted in 2005 after strategic reversals and an unexpected capital raising. 

Christopher Morvillo, a senior US lawyer at Clifford Chance, is also among the missing. 

Separately, now that Barclays is lifting the bonus cap and increasing bonuses to up to ten times salaries, there are calls for salaries there to fall. 

The Times reports that an unnamed Barclays investor says that compensation for Barclays' CEO CS Venkatakrishnan and finance director Anna Cross should be rebalanced in favour of bonuses. 

While Barclays can hypothetically adjust salaries for most of its material risk-takers downwards after lifting the bonus cap (subject to their consent), it's less easy to trim salaries for Venkat and Cross. These are governed by a separate three-year remuneration policy, which was last negotiated in 2023. Venkat received 63% of his £4.64m total compensation as monthly fixed pay last year. Unless things change, he may soon be in the fortuitous position of receiving a higher bonus, alongside his monthly cash.

Meanwhile... 

Joanna Munro, the chief executive of HSBC alternatives, says her husband stayed at home “dealing with the cooking, the admin, the garden… everything”. At one point during her career, she still worked three days a week and pursued a masters in creative writing. (Financial News) 

NZZ am Sonntag, a Swiss newspaper, thinks UBS will need to cut a further 18,000 jobs by the end of 2026. (Swissinfo) 

Mastercard is cutting 1,000 people before September 30th. (Bloomberg) 

Hedge fund investors don't want to pay the huge fees for talent. "How rich do you need your hedge-fund manager to be?" (Business Insider) 

Three energy traders and an analyst left Millennium. (Bloomberg) 

Two young bankers in Singapore were charged last week in the island's largest ever money laundering case. Aged 26 and 29, they worked for Citi and Julius Baer respectively. (Bloomberg) 

An increasing amount of resources are needed to manually transform, enrich, reconcile and validate the trade data that isn’t fully automated. This means that operations jobs are at the forefront of automation in banks. (The Trade) 

Citadel Securities' CEO Peng Zhao drew an analogy between being an intern at Citadel Securities and a medal winner in the Olympics. "I really appreciated the tiny difference between the gold medalist and the swimmers that weren't on the podium. We're talking about tenths and sometimes hundredths of a second. Like those swimmers, we often compete to be just a little bit better and faster, and we take home the gold. So remember that that's what brought you here into this room. That's what will bring you onto the top of the podium." (Business Insider) 

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