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Wall Street’s damsels are turning to white knights.
In the latest move, Jefferies Group yesterday agreed to be scooped up by investing conglomerate Leucadia National Corp. for nearly $4 billion.
The acquisition will place Jefferies CEO Rich Handler, 51, in the unique position at the helm of his firm’s acquirer — with Leucadia CEO and Chairman Ian Cumming, 71, expected to retire at year’s end.
Some feel the CEO position will help Handler pursue an acquisition-and-growth strategy. Cumming will stay on as a director.
Jefferies’ moves comes three months after Knight Capital, which was on the brink of filing for bankruptcy after a technical glitch in its trading program blew a hole in its balance sheet, turned to a consortium of investors including Jefferies, Blackstone, Getco and TD Ameritrade to bail it out.
The Jefferies deal eliminates one of Wall Street’s last pure-play investment banks — while in the process creating one of the odder financial-sector hookups.
However, it’s one that Handler believed that his firm needed to strike in order to allay concerns that his bank — smaller than its rivals Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — possibly may be vulnerable to going under.
Indeed, such concerns came to a head last fall when investors fretted over the bank’s exposures to foreign debt during the height of the European debt crisis.
The rush into Leucadia’s arms provides Jefferies with additional capital in tough times from an investor that has had a more than decade-long relationship with the bank — and already owned a nearly 30 percent stake in it.
Jefferies will become a portfolio company of Leucadia — dubbed “Baby Berkshire” due to its hodgepodge of investments, akin to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.
Meanwhile, Rochdale Securities, which got upended by a rogue trader’s purchase of $1 billion in Apple shares, is still fielding calls from potential investors in the boutique broker dealer.