LONDON - The Vodafone-Ono marriage featured many of the investment bank names one would expect in a deal worth about $10 billion.
Morgan Stanley was lead financial adviser for Vodafone; Ono’s lead financial adviser was Deutsche Bank. Bank of America Merrill Lynch, UBS and JPMorgan Chase were “co-advisers†to Ono.
However, one name stuck out among the rest: the boutique advisory firm Robertson Robey Associates, which advised Vodafone’s board of directors on the deal.
The firm features three star deal makers who have struck out on their own in London: Simon Robey, a former senior Morgan Stanley banker; Simon Robertson, deputy chairman of HSBC and a longtime banker; and Simon Warshaw, the former co-head of investment banking at UBS.
Mr. Robertson, the former chairman of the Rolls-Royce Group, left Goldman Sachs in 2005 to start his own advisory firm. Mr. Robey teamed up with Mr. Robertson at the beginning of last year after he left Morgan Stanley as co-chairman of global mergers and acquisitions.
Mr. Warshaw joined the pair in the fall, less than a month after he played a lead role at UBS in Vodafone’s $130 billion deal to sell its stake in Verizon Wireless in the United States to Verizon Communications.
The Vodafone-Verizon deal was one of the largest in history and likely played a role in Robertson Robey being enlisted to advise Vodafone’s board.
