Saturday, March 8, 2014

MEET Adebayo Ogunlesi: United States’ 7th Most Powerful Black Business Executive


Mr. Adebayo Ogunlesi, was born to the family of Prof. & Mrs. T.O. Ogunlesi of Makun, Sagamu, Ogun State, Nigeria. His father was the first Nigerian Professor of Medicine. He attended King’s College, Lagos, Nigeria, after which he received his B.A. with first class honours in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University, his J.D. magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School and his M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School.

He travelled to England to earn an honours degree from Oxford University, then entered a joint law-business degree programme at Harvard University in the late 1970s. At the law school, he was one of just three non-Americans in his class. “There was a guy from Saudi Arabia, a guy from Iran and me,” he joked with the New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. “When I resumed at Harvard, I thought that all of us would go back to our countries, become rich, and endow chairs. I hope the Iranian and Saudi did, because I never endowed a chair.”

Adebayo Ogunlesi is currently Chairman and Managing Partner of Global Infrastructure Partners, a $15 billion joint venture whose initial investors included Credit Suisse and General Electric. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of Goldman Sachs. Prior to his current role, he was Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Client Officer of Credit Suisse, based in New York. He previously served as a member of Credit Suisse’s Executive Board and Management Council and chaired the Chairman’s Board. Previously, he was the Global Head of

Investment Banking at Credit Suisse. Since joining Credit Suisse in 1983, Mr. Ogunlesi has advised clients on strategic transactions and financings in a broad range of industries and has worked on transactions in North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Prior to joining Credit Suisse, Mr. Ogunlesi was an attorney in the corporate practice group of the New York law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore. From 1980-81 he served as a law clerk to Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court.

Ogunlesi is a member of the District of Columbia Bar Association. He was a lecturer at Harvard Law School and the Yale School of Organization and Management, where he taught a course on transnational investment projects in emerging countries.

He is married to an optometrist, Dr. Amelia Quist-Ogunlesi, and the family is blessed with one son.

Adebayo Ogunlesi is a leading executive at Credit Suisse First Boston Corporation (CSFB), an arm of the Zurich-based global investment bank with offices on six continents. In February 2002, he was named head of CSFB’s investment banking group. The rise of this Harvard-educated lawyer prompted Time magazine to name him to its “People to Watch in International Business” list a few weeks later, and Ogunlesi was also ranked by Fortune magazine as the seventh most powerful black executive in the United States.

Before he graduated from magna cum laude in 1979, Ogunlesi served as editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review at a historic moment when he, along with W. Randy Eaddy, were the first two blacks ever to become Review editors at the top-ranked law school. Following standard practice for such Ivy League law school students and recent graduates, Ogunlesi then clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. At the time, Ogunlesi was the first to earn his law degree and a master’s degree in business administration, He entered private


practice with the firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore in New York City. In 1983, when he had been there less than a year, he received a phone call from a friend back in Nigeria who was working at the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy. The friend needed a financial adviser for a planned natural gas venture, and asked Ogunlesi for help. Credit Suisse First Boston

Corporation (CSFB) was involved in the financing and, as Ogunlesi recalled to Sorkin, “somehow the guys at First Boston found out that this fellow was a friend of mine.” First Boston then asked the law firm if they could grant Ogunlesi leave for three months to help win the account.

Ogunlesi liked the world of international finance so much that he stayed on board at CSFB. “Of course, six months after I got hired here, there was a coup in Nigeria, the government got tossed out and my friend almost went to jail,” he recalled in the interview with Sorkin. Ogunlesi’s own career path was smoother: he rose through the company’s management ranks,

eventually heading CSFB’s project finance group. When that group merged with the power-finance group, he remained in charge. Two other mergers, with CSFB’s oil and gas group and chemicals group, made the unit so large that it was–once again in reference to Ogunlesi’s given name–nicknamed the “Bayo-sphere,” according to Sorkin.

Ogunlesi was made a managing director at CSFB in 1993. His division, now called the Global Energy Group, obtained financing for large-scale energy projects around the globe. For Texaco and Mission Energy, for example, Ogunlesi headed a team that raised $400 million for a Tri-Energy project in Thailand. His division also came up with $100 million in financing for the Androscoggin Power Project in Maine, and helped a British firm break grounds in China on the Mezhiou Wan power project.

He was also given a seat on the CSFB board with his promotion, replacing Tony James, who became chair of global investment banking and private equity. Thomas, in the New York magazine article, compared Ogunlesi with his predecessor, asserting that, “as impressive as Ogunlesi is, the identity of the man he replaced … is what gave his appointment a more profound resonance.”

Nonetheless, Ogunlesi faced some daunting tasks in his first year on the job, not the least of which was to turn around CSFB’s global investment banking division, which had posted its first unprofitable quarter in four years. He announced a reorganization plan, telling several dozen CSFB executives that the company’s departments were overstaffed, and that changes would

be forthcoming. “We’re going to break a lot of glass,” the New York Times’s Sorkin quoted him as saying. Some top executives balked at the plan and resigned, but the job-cutting was part of a wave of downsizing at many of Wall Street’s top firms at the time. A moribund economy and the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon had spurred immense losses in the securities and banking sector. “Ogunlesi scolded bankers during the meeting for not paying enough attention to turning a profit, and encouraged employees to take taxis instead of limousines.”

True to his word, a round of cutbacks delivered pink slips to the desks of 300 bankers in March of 2002. Ogunlesi also decided, with the support of CSFB’s board of directors, to merge the company’s telecommunications and media groups. A few weeks later, in early April, more than four dozen managing directors were let go.

Ogunlesi has been hailed as one of Wall Street’s most influential new names and as one of its most impressive cost-cutters in recent memory. He once said in New York Times, “I told you, I never wanted to be an investment banker.”

“Adebayo brings extensive experience in finance and the global capital markets to our board of directors,” Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman, said in a statement. “Our board and our shareholders will benefit from Adebayo’s wealth of knowledge and rigorous thinking.”

He has engineered financing for some of the biggest energy projects throughout the world. His firm, Credit Suisse First Boston, under Ogunlesi’s direction, helped AES acquire generation assets from Edison International in California with financing in the $725 million area. Ogunlesi’s division helped Texaco and Mission Energy raise about $400 million for Tri-Energy in

Thailand and worked with the Polsky Group to raise $100 million for the Androscoggin Power Project in Maine. He is also working with InterGen out of the United Kingdom and Hong Kong to finance the Mezhiou Wan power project in China and helping sponsors raise capital for projects in India, Mid-East and US “It has been a very active year,” he reported.

The latest development in an already full portfolio of achievements for Ogunlesi is the revolutionary financing arrangements for clients. Helping to make the cost of power more manageable, financing is now more closely allied to the useful life of facilities or plants.


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