The Rio line up

Here is an interesting snippet on the Rio Tinto/Glencore situation.

I hear from top sources that Rio Tinto has retained Simon Robey's M&A advisory boutique Robey Warshaw alongside its corporate brokers and other financial advisers to work on "strategic" matters. Undoubtedly, Robey Warshaw will be providing the Rio board with advice on how to defend themselves from Glasenberg and Glencore, which earlier this year made a multi-billion dollar takeover approach for its rival.

However, don't get too excited. People familiar with the situation tell me Robey - who has advised on some of the biggest deals this year, including Aviva's £5 billion acquisition of Friends Life - has been working Rio Tinto for quite some time (i.e. since he left Morgan Stanley a couple of years ago).

Still, it's interesting that some of the biggest names in dealmaking are crawling all over this situation and this isn't even a "live" deal, yet.

For readers that don't recall, the Financial Times wrote a piece in October about how former Citigroup rainmaker Michael Klein is the man to the bring the two companies together as he advised on the merger of Glencore and Xstrata in 2012. Here is a link to that article:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/67a9233e-5dc2-11e4-897f-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3KIMeqvus

And a couple of weeks ago, Bloomberg reported that Ian Hannam, the former JP Morgan Cazenove banker, got a bunch of hedge funds together at Corrigans in Mayfair as part of move to help position his firm, Hannam & Partners, to win a role in the transaction - although a person close the banker denies he organised the meeting to win an advisory role on the mega deal. Here is a link to the Bloomberg piece:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-24/glencore-rio-merger-will-happen-hannam-tells-hedge-funds.html

I wonder which superstar rainmaker will turn up next angling for a role on this potential mega deal?