Fortis Plans to Hire at Least 10 Commodities Traders

By Claudia Carpenter

Sept. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Fortis Bank (Nederland) NV, owned by the Dutch government, plans to hire at least 10 commodities traders, brokers and sales people as it expands from energy into precious and industrial metals and agriculture.

Seven agriculture brokers from BNP Paribas Fortis including Jonathan Parkman and Eric Sivry will join in London in November, said Seb Walhain, global head of energy, carbon and commodities at Fortis Bank in Amsterdam. That will take the team to 15 in London and Amsterdam and Fortis is also hiring for its Hong Kong and New York offices, he said. The commodities business now covers oil and environmental products such as emissions trading.

“We will offer a full range of products from energy to carbon and commodities,” Walhain, 37, said by phone today. “We want to hire another 10 people and if all goes well maybe another 20 people” by the end of the year.

Societe Generale SA, Bank of America Corp., Barclays Plc and Morgan Stanley are among banks hiring commodity personnel after copper prices doubled and crude oil jumped 54 percent this year. Commodity prices as measured by the Standard & Poor’s GSCI Index of 24 commodities jumped 27 percent this year, exceeding a 16 percent gain in the MSCI World Index of stocks and a 2.8 percent drop in Treasuries.

Banking and Insurance

The Netherlands bought Fortis’s Dutch banking and insurance units and its stake in ABN Amro Holding NV for 16.8 billion euros ($24 billion) after the company ran out of short-term funding. Pascal Henisse, a spokesman for BNP Paribas in Paris, didn’t immediately respond to e-mails seeking comment.

“We’ve been in commodities for centuries,” Walhain said. “We lost some of the business as part of all the turmoil and we’re just getting back into it as soon as we can.”

Walhain said he plans to go to New York next week to recruit for the office on Park Avenue.

Fortis Bank’s merchant banking business, which includes energy, commodities, transportation and principal finance, had net income of 39 million euros ($55.6 million) in the first half of the year, according to a presentation on the company’s Web site. Total profit fell to 338 million euros from 543 million euros a year earlier, the company said last month.

The Dutch government plans to merge all of Fortis Bank’s assets under the ABN Amro name and then sell it to private investors after 2011.

To contact the reporter on this story: Claudia Carpenter in London at ccarpenter2@bloomberg.net