CONDUCTING BUSINESS

摘要

When michael zaoui was 14, he wrote to the Conservatoire de Paris asking if he could enroll in the music school to train as an orchestra conductor. "They told me I was Too old," recalls Zaoui, now a governor of London's Southbank Centre arts complex. "I was devastated." Instead, he applied his talent to orchestrating some of Europe's biggest M&A deals, in a long career at Morgan Stanley and now at Zaoui & Co., the advisory firm he runs with his younger brother,Yoel. Zaoui, 56, has excellent timing. He resigned as vice chairman of Morgan Stanley's institutional securities group in mid-2008, on the eve of the financial crisis. Early last year he and Yoel, who had enjoyed a similarly successful career as an M&A partner at Goldman Sachs & Co. before leaving in 2012, launched their addition to a growing band of advisory boutiques that also includes New York's IionTree Advisors and London-based Ondra Partners.