Cieszko leaves Legg Mason for Wachovia’s Evergreen

FWR Staff

12 June 2006

Citigroup Asset Management’s former SMA exec turns to institutional manager. Separately managed account pioneer Peter Cieszko has left Legg Mason to join Evergreen Investments, Wachovia’s institutional asset-management business. Neither Legg Mason nor Evergreen could comment on the news as of deadline on Monday. Legg Mason said it would release a statement on Cieszko’s appointment today.

Cieszko was one of Citigroup Asset Management’s top executives when it was exchanged for Legg Mason’s brokerage business, about $1.5 billion in Legg Mason common stock and a $550-million loan from Citi’s investment bank.

Visionary

As head of CAM’s U.S. retail and high-net-worth group from 2000, Cieszko presided over the biggest SMA production complex in the business, with about $63.3 billion in assets under management by the time of the handover to Legg Mason at the end of 2005.

A hallmark of Cieszko’s tenure at CAM was the rise of the multiple-discipline account – a kind of SMA that bundles complementary investment styles in a single registered account. CAM had been fiddling with MDAs for six or seven years already when Cieszko took over the division’s SMA business – and gave them the push they needed to achieve prominence.

“Peter is a great leader and a true visionary in the asset management industry,” says Jamie Waller, COO of Fugent , a Rye, N.Y.-based online collaboration-platform provider to the financial-service industry and former head of CAM’s third-party investment platform. “He sees opportunity long before others are even aware of the changes afoot.”

Daniel Seivert, managing partner of Los Angeles-based 3C Financial Partners, an investment bank and strategic consultancy to wealth-management firms, has a similarly high opinion of Cieszko. “He has had a long tenure at the helm the industry's largest managed account vessel,” says Seivert. “Experience like that is bound to make him a strategic asset to any management firm.” –FWR