Credit Suisse hires from troubled Lehman and Merrill

LONDON (Reuters) - Swiss bank Credit Suisse has poached senior investment bankers from Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, taking advantage of the turmoil around two of the major U.S. investment banks.

According to a Credit Suisse memo sent to Reuters on Monday, Philippe Cerf will join the bank as a managing director in the European mergers and acquisitions group in December.

Cerf spent 14 years at Lehman, which has filed for bankruptcy protection, becoming the largest and the highest-profile casualty of the credit crisis.

Jeffrey Culpepper also started at Credit Suisse in August as head of investment banking in the Middle East and Africa. He previously worked as the most senior investment banker in the Middle East for Merrill Lynch, which has agreed to sell itself to Bank of America.

Merrill is stuck with some of the same toxic debt -- much of it mortgage-related -- that torpedoed Lehman's balance sheet.

Credit Suisse has also recruited Ian Carnegie Brown from Citigroup as a managing director in the UK investment banking group and Anthony Laubi from Deutsche Bank as a managing director and head of European paper and packaging investment banking.

(Reporting by Olesya Dmitracova; Editing by David Holmes)