Ren puts pedigree back in circulation
The murky world of Chinese investment banking is all about guanxi - relationships - and perhaps no one has been more successful at leveraging theirs than former star Citigroup banker Margaret Ren.
First and foremost, she has the pedigree necessary to navigate the cauldrons of power in Beijing without getting burnt.
The daughter of former Guangdong Party Secretary Ren Zhongyi, Ms Ren, 48, graduated with a master's degree from Princeton University. She met and later married former premier Zhao Ziyang's fourth son, Zhao Sijun, a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Although Zhao Ziyang spent the last 15 years of his life under house arrest following the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, Ms Ren's association with such a high-level figure was enough to open virtually any door in China.
After a successful nine-year career at Bear Stearns, when she got the broker included in the China Telecom initial public offering, Ms Ren was poached by Citigroup in 2001 with a more than US$8 million package to head its China business. She soon set about securing share sale and advisory assignments worth about US$200 million in fees.
That included also getting Citigroup a seat at the table for the China Telecom deal, as well as being part of the IPOs of China Netcom, Minsheng Bank, China Construction Bank and the 2003 stock offer of China Life Insurance in New York and Hong Kong.
It was this last deal that marked a reversal of fortune for both Ms Ren and Citigroup. She was fired, along with her deputy Earl Yen, in June 2004 for allegedly falsifying IPO documents submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
After her dismissal, Citigroup, the top arranger of equity and equity-linked sales by Chinese companies in 2003, fell to ninth in the next two years and lost the mandate for CCB. Ms Ren, meanwhile, went into limbo, awaiting an SEC decision on whether she would ever work as a dealmaker again.
In September last year, the SEC cleared her of wrongdoing, paving the way for her to start capitalising on her connections again. Ms Ren has stepped back into the murky world she knows so well with Merrill Lynch but industry sources estimate she is likely to be on a fraction of her former princely salary.
