By Kane Wu and Julie Zhu
HONG KONG, Sept 24 (Reuters) – A senior Morgan Stanley banker covering financial sponsors in Asia accidentally leaked their deal pipeline in an email sent to clients, according to six people with knowledge of the matter.
The banker attached the financial sponsors group’s deal pipeline by mistake in a weekly update email he sent to clients, the people said.
“Morgan Stanley takes client confidentiality extremely seriously. We promptly took steps to address this inadvertent sharing of information and we continue to engage with relevant parties,” a spokesperson for the Wall Street bank said in an emailed response to Reuters on Thursday.
The banker later retracted the email and apologised for the mishap, urging recipients to delete copies of the attachment and refrain from circulating the document, according to a screenshot of the email seen by Reuters.
The list, dated September 21, contained about 60 live IPO, M&A and block trade deals across Greater China, South Korea, Southeast Asia, India and the EMEA region.
It also included over 50 deals that were categorised as “pitching” and nearly 30 deals categorised as “on hold”. All of those deals concern Asian companies.
The vast majority of the companies on the list are portfolios of major global and regional private equity and venture capital firms.
Bloomberg first reported on the incident late on Wednesday.
The list did not contain details of any of the deals, and a lot of them have already been reported, according to some people who received the email.
(Reporting by Kane Wu and Julie Zhu in Hong Kong; Additional reporting by Yantoultra Ngui; Editing by Jan Harvey)
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