Softs
Significant talent moves
Talent search and competitive intelligence specialists
Our summary of the late 2020 Softs moves starts with Comexim Geneva taking former ETG head of coffee Alex Perk to become its Green-Coffee Trader and Head-Europe. Alex has traded coffee in HCM City for Noble and in London for Armajaro Trading. Immediately before ETG he was in Ecuador as Head-Green Coffee for Elcafé.
Vivid Sehgal joins Tate & Lyle in London in March and will become its CFO in May upon the departure of Imran Nawaz who is taking up a CFO position with Tesco plc. Following financial management positions at GlaxoSmithKline and Diageo, Vivid was a regional finance director for Procter & Gamble’s Gillette brand and an SVP at Allergan before becoming the finance chief for LivaNova three years ago.
Sucafina hires Frederico Novais da Fonseca to move from Madrid to Geneva as Coffee Sales Trader. His first placement in the coffee business had been in a junior trader capacity at the Coprocafe Iberica arm of Neumann Kaffee group in 2016. Since 2018, Frederico has been in Madrid as Trader responsible for business-to-business sales in the Portuguese market for Ibericafé.
Duran, Guayaquil, has become the new Ecuadorian base for Inge Veldt with her appointment by Olam to be Business Manager-Cocoa for Ecuador. She heads to South America from power trading in Rotterdam with Eneco. Before that, there was intraday power trading for Vattenfall in Amsterdam.
*Based on data gathered by Commodity Appointments’ Softs team
*Based on data gathered by Commodity Appointments’ Softs team
Girish Chhimwal is the new Sugar Analyst for S&P Global Platts. It keeps him in Singapore after his three years there in Asian sugar and ethanol market research analysis for ECTP. He did work as an analyst at Bunge Singapore until a within-company move to Mumbai in 2014.
Fort Lauderdale news that Joseph Masucci becomes Head-Commercial Trading at Sucafina NA. He’d been a senior trader in the coffee business there since 2018. Other past employers include Coex Coffee International and Matsui Foods. Further Sucafina hires in North America are Aileen Rerhrhaye (SVP-Marketing & Trading) and Rob Menos (Global BD Director). Aileen switches from Mercon Coffee, Rob from Coex Coffee International.
After graduating from Milan with a Masters degree in biomedical engineering, Mirko Bellocchio moved to The Netherlands initially as a troubleshooter on medical instruments. But then came an interest in the cocoa supply chain, initially with Cocoanect of Rotterdam and then founder/director of Caboosa in the same city. Today he’s in North Holland to be a Cocoa Trader with Daarnhouwer.
Cofco International in Rotterdam chooses Manfredo Behrens for Commodity Trader, Manfredo has held the same job title previously when with Nidera and at Nizi International in Luxembourg.
In another Dutch company appointment, Interfood Group fills a vacancy for Dairy Commodity Trader in the APAC region by hiring Jonathan Kruithof. He arrives from trading dairy derivatives and vegetable products for Feed & Food Trading in Zeist.
Eduardo Sia takes the São Paulo posting of Sugar Trader with Raízen. For nearly 10 years previously, Eduardo had been trading sugar from Centre/South Brazil on behalf of Sucden.
Sucden Financial in London promotes Kirsty Gillies to Head-Futures & Soft Commodities following on from her work there over the past two years as global head of eFX sales. Electronic sales of foreign exchange also were in Kirsty’s hands when with Barclays Capital and UBS.
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Sustainable coffee is the sweet spot for Rozenn Kerviel. Experience at Kraft Foods in Paris and coffee projects in Central America have led her to Geneva. At first this was to be global head of sustainability in the LDC coffee division, now it is as Walter Matter company’s Head of Sustainability-Coffee & Cocoa.
Cofco International’s new CRO is Khaja Qureshi. Based at the international headquarters in Geneva, he takes over from Tony Tian who’s now regional MD for Brazil and North America. When Khaja joined Cofco International in 2018 it was as global head of market risk and deputy CRO. During the same year he moved up to MD of day-to-day risk management operations. He had come to the company after more than 15 years of handling business risk operations and global commodities market risk management at JP Morgan and Socar Trading.
Jaime O’Donahue is a former COO and CEO in Asia for LDC who now returns to its Singapore offices to be Asia Head of Coffee. His previous Dreyfus employment had started in cotton in Belgium in 2001 before heading to Beijing three years later and switching to Singapore in 2015.
Promotion at Franck of Zagreb for Damjan Sutlic makes him Head-Green Coffee Procurement. Damjan had initially been a coffee supply specialist for the company, having switched from eight years of investment banking with Croatia’s Raiffeisenbank Hrvatska.
Finally this time, we find Simon McGuigan at commodity brokerage MCG in London for its futures and options broking. The softs and ags specialist was formerly MD-Commodities for JB Drax Honoré.
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This is merely a snapshot of some of the recent people moves and associated trends observed by our Softs research team at Commodity.
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