Arthur Kim is a co-founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of Claris Group. He has over 35 years of U.S. and international investment banking experience. Mr. Kim has completed investment banking transactions and advised corporate and government clients in North America, Asia, Europe and the former Soviet bloc. Mr. Kim retains an extensive network of business and government relationships in Asia and emerging markets around the world. Mr. Kim began his investment banking career with Lehman Brothers. He obtained a BA degree in Economics from Columbia University.
Joseph Wilson is a co-founder and Chairman of Claris Group. He has over 40 years of international investment banking experience and was formerly a Managing Director and Head of the Cross-Border Financing Group of Merrill Lynch of New York. He has advised over 50 international governmental and corporate clients on a wide range of debt instruments. He specialized in structuring debt financing for issuers that experienced problems in accessing public and private markets, either as new issuers or those with specific size requirements. He has created innovative, structured financing techniques in public and private markets in the U.S., Canada and Europe.
Dick D’Addario has primary responsibility for portfolio management, asset evaluation and investor relations for the Claris asset management group. Prior to joining Claris, Mr. D’Addario was a Senior Portfolio Manager at Avenue Capital Group where he formed the firm’s CLO business to invest in corporate senior secured and mezzanine loans. Previously, Mr. D’Addario was a Senior Vice President of Franklin Advisers, Inc. and the Chief Investment Officer for the Franklin Bank Debt Group, the Director of Banking & Finance for Soros, and a vice president at Citibank. Mr. D’Addario received a B.A. in Russian language from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst as well as an M.B.A. in Finance from The University of Massachusetts.
Ian Fisher has more than 40 years of U.S. and international investment banking experience, including 25 years of specialization in M&A. Mr. Fisher was one of nine Managing Directors of Merrill Lynch & Co. and advised on eight of the firm’s largest publicly disclosed M&A advisory assignments. Mr. Fisher has advised more than 90 clients on a panoptic array of M&A transactions – ranging in value from less than $100 million to more than $100 billion – involving companies in more than one dozen countries. He has presided over or participated on ad hoc fairness opinion committees in connection with other M&A transactions exceeding $40 billion in value. He has given expert testimony on M&A issues in several US District Court cases. Mr. Fisher has a Master of Science degree in Finance and a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Brian McKinley has over 40 years of experience providing strategic, financial and investment advisory services to sovereign, corporate and institutional clients in the Americas, Europe and the Middle East. Previously, over a 14 year career with Merrill Lynch he was head of the firm’s investment banking activities in Spain and Portugal and served as a member of the advisory team to the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency in Riyadh, with responsibility for over US $120 billion in assets. Mr. McKinley received his M.Sc. in Business Studies from the London Business School and graduated from the University of Southampton with a B.Sc. in Economics and Politics.
John Niehuss is a lawyer/investment banker specialized in international legal and financial matters. He was previously general counsel of the Inter-American Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of the United States. He spent eleven years as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch concentrating on project finance, emerging market equity funds and international bond issues; six years working on international financial and economic matters at the White House Council on International Economic Policy and the Treasury Department; and five years in the development lending field at the World Bank and the Ministry of Finance of Zambia. He was educated at Amherst college, the University of Michigan Law School, the London School of Economics and the Faculte Internationale de Droit Compare in Luxembourg.