Lazard hires Greenhill principal – exclusive

A Greenhill Cogent principal and Secondaries Investor Young Gun is set to join Lazard, the second secondaries professional to move across this year.

Nadira Huda will join as a director in Lazard’s London office, according to two people with knowledge of the situation. She will report to Holcombe Green, Lazard’s global head of secondary transaction advisory, and work alongside Johanna Lottmann, who heads up the European business. Her current and future titles are roughly equivalent in seniority, Secondaries Investor understands.

Huda began at Greenhill in 2010, according to her LinkedIn profile.

She will officially leave the firm at the end of June, according to one of the sources. Her starting date at Lazard is unclear.

Huda ranked seventh in the Young Guns of Secondaries Class of 2016, Secondaries Investor‘s annual list of the most impressive industry professionals under the age of 36. She is known as the ‘queen of tail-ends’ around having worked on some of the early deals when tail-end sales were a fledgling part of the market.

Huda’s hire follows the news in January that Greenhill’s managing director in charge of Asia, Dominic Woessner, had joined Lazard’s eight-strong, Singapore-based Asian secondaries team.

Lazard has worked on a number of high-profile GP-led deals over the past year including Warburg Pincus‘s strip sale with Lexington Partners and Goldman Sachs Asset Management. The firm was is understood to be working on a GP-led process involving Thomas H Lee’s $8.1 billion sixth fund, as Secondaries Investor reported in February.

Greenhill topped Secondaries Investor‘s 2017 annual advisory survey by volume, having worked on 62 secondaries transactions worth $11.9 billion in last year. LP stake transactions accounted for 90 percent of its work by volume.

Greenhill and Lazard declined to comment.

*Article amended to reflect that Huda will report to Holcombe Green.