Barclays seeks Moscow office to expand fast

Barclays Plc, Britain's third-biggest bank, plans to open a Moscow office and "quickly" expand to gain a bigger share of investment-banking fees, Hans-Joerg Rudloff, chairman of the securities unit, has said.

"We want to open a local presence this year and expand it quickly to 200 people," Rudloff said in an interview at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum on Saturday. "Local capital markets are growing very quickly."

Barclays Capital, which won its first loan in Russia in February 2005, fell three places to the seventh in terms of arranging Russian syndicated loans this year, according to Bloomberg News data. ABN Amro Holding NV, the Dutch bank that Barclays is trying to buy, has about 300 people in Moscow and is the top-ranked underwriter of Russian loans.

"We also intend to enter consumer banking," said Rudloff, who ran Credit Suisse First Boston in the early 1990s, when the firm expanded into Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. "We would have done something already, but now ABN Amro delays it."