Morning Coffee: Some possible reactions to being fired by JPMorgan or by Citi. What if Jain Global cut people after all?

Financial services firms fire people. It's a sad fact of life, but it also comes with the territory of what can be very high pay at a comparatively young age and the ability to wear a vest/gilet in all weathers if male.

When you are fired from your financial services job, you have three options. You can go quietly. You can go noisily. Or you can go quietly and then make a noise. If you choose option three, you can sometimes use the law to amplify the noise that is made.

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Two people, one at Citi and one at JPMorgan have recently chosen the third option.

At Citi, Bloomberg reports that Reagan Nettleingham, a former salesperson in the bank's industrial metals sales team, was among various commodities professionals let go when the US bank quietly shaved its physical industrial metals business earlier this year. 

Nettleingham's 10 other former colleagues seem to have gone quietly and we know nothing of them. Nettleingham himself, however, is currently in a London employment tribunal arguing that he was targeted because he made "protected disclosures" relating to "rogue sales" of agricultural commodities last year. As such, he is a whistleblower. As a whistleblower, he will be entitled to uncapped compensation if he wins his case. 

Will he win his case? Citi's lawyers are saying he was simply made redundant as a result of weak performance in the unit and that they investigated the "processes and procedures" he was complaining about and found nothing of concern. Nettleingham, though, is saying: 

"This is a straightforward case of a whistleblower raising concerns, and being stereotypically branded as unhelpful, a problem, or something that had to be managed out, rather than genuinely listened to.” 

Possibly unhelpfully, Nettleingham did not raise these concerns in writing until Citi informed him that he might be let go. A final court hearing is due. Nettleingham told Bloomberg he's looking forward to this. Unfortunately, the judge has said that Citi doesn't have to pay him while he does so.

Over at JPMorgan, someone else also seems to have been let go too. The New York Post is reporting that a socially awkward male Rutgers graduate in his mid-30s joined JPMorgan's leveraged finance team and then made allegations against Lorna Hajdini, a female JPMorgan executive director, whom he claimed sexually abused and exploited him.

JPMorgan investigated and reportedly put the Rutgers graduate on involuntary leave, locking him out of all its systems. No evidence of inappropriate behaviour on the part of Hajdini was found. The Rutgers graduate now works for a private equity firm. 

Hajdini's lawyer is saying: 

“Lorna categorically denies the allegations. She never engaged in any inappropriate conduct with this individual of any kind and has never even been to the location where the alleged sexual assault supposedly took place.”

The Rutgers graduate said nothing to the New York Post. He has now retracted the court document that made his lurid claims, starting with the intentional dropping of a pen and rubbing of a leg. It is possible to place bets on the outcome of this sequence of events, but a quiet exit might have been better all round. 

Separately, hedge fund Jain Global is absolutely and categorically not taking money from hedge fund Millennium with the intention of cutting costs and using Millennium's infrastructure platform to do so. 

But what if it did?

Rupak Ghose, who has a Substack and was once a financials analyst at Credit Suisse has been considering this question. "Leveraging Millennium’s deep and geographically widespread infrastructure in business development, client servicing, risk, technology and other areas would offer substantial savings," he suggests. 

What sorts of savings? "My channel checks suggest that a 50% headcount reduction to non-investing staff numbers at Jain Global is plausible." 

Plausible does not mean probable. It just means possible. Bobby Jain spoke some these words this week, saying that the possibility will not come to pass: 

"To be clear, this is not about subsuming us and extracting synergies. It is all about accelerating our trajectory in a period where scaling and resourcing will define the winners and losers." 

Meanwhile...

Someone at Julius Baer was dismissed after flagging alleged sanctions violations involving the Iran and Russia. A court says Julius Baer has to rehire him. (Bloomberg) 

Citi wants double digit revenue growth in Japan. Maybe it will hire there. Robert Nakamura is the man to talk to. He is suggesting that salaries there might rise. (Bloomberg) 

Rokos will have itself an Abu Dhabi office. (Bloomberg) 

Citi hired Brian Saluzzo from Google. He will be the new chief information officer, reporting to Tim Ryan. (Finextra) 

SocGen's fixed income sales and trading revenues fell 18%. Its shares fell 5%. (Bloomberg) 

Wells Fargo’s average trading-related assets were up by more than 40% in the first quarter. Combined equities and fixed income trading revenues were up 19%. (WSJ) 

JPMorgan hired Chris Mihok ​from Keefe, Bruyette & Woods ‌as a managing director to cover banks. (Reuters) 

JPMorgan hired Oliver Harris to lead its blockchain division Kinexys. He was at Goldman Sachs. (Bloomberg) 

Indian high frequency trading firm Graviton Research is expanding in Singapore and London. It has impeccable infrastructure using a technology stack designed to outrun strategies written using standard C++ and lets researchers code trading strategies in a language familiar to them, which is then compiled into instructions that execute directly onto programmable FPGA chips. It's doubled its headcount in recent years and now employs 400 people. (Bloomberg) 

European banks have set aside €610m ($710m) to cover potential losses relating to war in the Middle East. (Bloomberg) 

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