Senior staff have been silently slipping out of Pimco's London office

Pimco is cutting 3% of its global workforce. In a memo dispatched yesterday, the asset management firm said it's cutting costs responsibly in the wake of a fall in assets under management. The Wall Street Journal says most of the cuts are due to come in operations, technology and client-facing roles. However, our research suggests that several senior investment staff have left Pimco's London operation since April.

The exits, which may simply be symptomatic of senior staff seeking opportunities elsewhere, have gone unreported. Stefan De Wachter, head of the European mortgage strategy desk at Pimco, left for Austrian bank BAWAG P.S.K in April. Eugene Dimitriou, a former senior vice president at Pimco, joined Columbia Threadneedle Investments as head of insurance solutions in May. Caroline Martin-Glinel, a former vice president in consultant relations at Pimco, joined  Och Ziff Capital Management as head of consultant relations in April.

Not all the peope who've left Pimco have found new jobs.  Vladyslav Putyatin, a former senior vice president and portfolio manager who was responsible for European quantitative modelling at Pimco, left in February and has yet to reappear. So too have Riccardo Rebonato, a market risk and quantitative analytics specialist whom Pimco hired from RBS in 2012 and who left in April, and Mike Trovato, the former head of ETFs whose exit was publicised in February.

Pimco has a reputation for paying its people extremely well. In the last year for which accounts are available (2014), Pimco Europe employed 302 people and paid them an average of £588k ($840k). In the U.S., Pimco is reportedly inviting staff to put themselves forward for voluntary redundancy. However, the fund management firm's extreme generosity combined with the general lack of jobs in London may mean there aren't many takers if it tries the same thing in the City.

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