Neil B. Morganbesser is an investment banker with over 18 years of experience providing financial and strategic advice to a full range of clients, including entrepreneurs, large corporations, governments, family businesses, private equity funds, and special committees of public companies. Mr. Morganbesser has been affiliated with some of the leading institutions in the world, and his experience ranges from representing the offshore owners in the sale of a small, private U.S. company for $10 million to representing the special committee of a large, public company in a $9 billion negotiated management buyout with a highly complex financial structure. Mr. Morganbesser has truly global experience with the most sophisticated transactions, across a broad range of industries and in a large number of jurisdictions, as the lead banker on a wide variety of transactional and other advisory assignments, including domestic and cross-border mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, sales and divestitures, restructurings, special committee assignments, unsolicited acquisitions and hostile defense.  With transactional experience in over 20 countries, Mr. Morganbesser has successfully advised on over 75 transactions with aggregate values totaling in excess of $65 billion. Until May 2008, Mr. Morganbesser was the head of West Coast and Asian Mergers & Acquisitions at Bear Stearns & Co., as a Senior Managing Director based in Los Angeles.  Prior to joining Bear Stearns in May 2001, Mr. Morganbesser was an investment banker in the Mergers, Acquisitions and Restructuring Group at Morgan Stanley (in New York from 1993-1998 and in Los Angeles from 1998-2001).  From 1990-1993, Mr. Morganbesser was a corporate and M&A attorney at the preeminent New York law firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.  Speaking engagements and awards Mr. Morganbesser regularly speaks on M&A to industry conferences from Los Angeles to Hong Kong.  Mr. Morganbesser is frequently cited in the general media, and he has been featured on the Bloomberg TV series “The Deal Makers” and repeatedly in FactSet Flashwire Weekly’s “What’s Happening Today in M&A.”  In 2005, Investment Dealers’ Digest magazine awarded the Hunan Valin / Mittal Steel transaction (in which Mr. Morganbesser was the senior M&A advisor to Hunan Valin Group) the title of the “Breakthrough M&A Deal of the Year” – a landmark transaction that represented the largest M&A transaction to date involving a Chinese exchange-listed company and an international strategic investor.  Education Mr. Morganbesser graduated with an A.B. magna cum laude in Applied Mathematics / Economics from Harvard University (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1986 and received his J.D. and M.B.A. degrees (Order of the Coif, with honors) from Stanford University in 1990.