People & Business

JON MOYNIHAN, who resigned as chairman and chief executive of PA Consulting last August, has just un-resigned.

In fact, despite headhunters being appointed to find his successor, Mr Moynihan never left office.

Let me explain. Mr Moynihan was at logger heads with the Butten Trust, set up by PA's founder Ernest Butten, over the share of profits allocated to former employees of PA. Mr Moynihan felt current employees weren't getting a big enough slice of the action.

Or, as Mr Moynihan put it yesterday, speaking from New York: "The matter over which I resigned got resolved just before Christmas in a way which I wanted it to be resolved."

Before the settlement, the Trust owned about 70 per cent of the "on-going value" of PA. Following the settlement, the Trust now owns some preference shares, which will provide income, and a "golden share" which will come into play if PA is ever sold. Apart from that, the current employees now call the tune.

"Following this discussion with the board (of the Trust), we decided I should stay," adds Mr Moynihan.

Even the headhunter's fee has not gone to waste. The person who came top of the list as Mr Moynihan's successor has metamorphosed into the next chief executive of PA. Mr Moynihan will stay on as executive chairman, but believes the fast-growing firm needs a chief executive as well. Expect an announcement soon.

WORKS by Picasso, Warhol and many other artists will be on display at law firm Collyer-Bristow's gallery in Holborn, London, and every single one will be a fake.

The exhibition, imaginatively titled "Fake", kicks off appropriately enough on 1 April, and is designed to raise awareness of the threat posed by counterfeiters the world over to British business.

The exhibition is the brainchild of Christopher Rennie- Smith, intellectual property partner at Collyer Bristow. It will feature fakes of branded goods such as Nike shoes, Chanel No 5, Johnny Walker whisky and Pepsi.

The law firm is part of the Anti-Counterfeiting Group, which lobbies government on behalf of companies which own threatened brands or intellectual property.

Collyer-Bristow originally started holding exhibitions at their offices because they represented so many artistic clients. Now they have formalised the process, and even have a part-time curator, Tamar Arnon, who puts together a new show every six to eight weeks.

ARTHUR ANDERSEN may be making a hash of things in its relationship with its Andersen Consulting colleagues, but the firm can still hire good people.

Andersen has just taken on Carol Arrowsmith, a big noise in the world of employee share schemes and the like, as a partner in the firm's broadly based Human Capital Services team.

Ms Arrowsmith joined New Bridge Street Consultants, an advisory firm linked to lawyers Clifford Chance, as a director in 1986, and took over as managing director in 1990. She is also a director of ProShare, the organisation promoting share-based investment.

She will be working with Brian Friedman, world-wide head of Andersen's Human Capital Services practice, and himself a recent hire from Stoy Hayward, the accountancy firm.

Mr Friedman welcomed Ms Arrowsmith to the practice, saying: "We are already a multi-disciplinary group with lawyers, actuaries, compensation and benefits specialists, taxation and change management experts offering a wide range of professional advice...."

Great. Not a boring old accountant in sight....

UBS continues to shed staff like a tree shedding apples in an autumn gale. Among those not going to merge with SBC Warburg are Patrick Kirby and Sue Cox, a media and a smaller companies analyst respectively, who have joined ABN Amro. And UBS's former head of European Equity research since 1994, Mark Howdle, has joined Salomon Smith Barney as director of Pan-European Strategy.

Not surprising, really, when you consider that SBC has taken 67 out of the 85 top jobs in merged equities division of UBS and Warburg Dillion Read.

Another shotgun merger, that between CSFB and BZW, has provided ABN Amro with another recruit, Garbiella Sexton, who joins the Dutch investment bank as European Equity Editor.

In fact, apart from ING, which seems to be reconsidering its investment in Barings, the Dutch are providing the best refuge for newly down-shifted bankers at the moment. Rabobank is reportedly seeking to recruit 700 capital markets people.

There again, First Chicago NBD have also taken someone on this week, in the form of Dr Giorgio Radaelli from Lehman Brothers. Dr Radaelli will bring a decade of experience as a market economist to First Chicago in London.