TD Centre office towers as pictured on April 17, 2014.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
The Toronto-Dominion Bank has brought in former Barrick Gold Corp. executive Rick McCreary as deputy chairman of its investment banking arm, TD Securities Inc., as it seeks to strengthen its efforts to work on mining deals around the world.
Mr. McCreary will work closely with Michael Faralla, the managing director and head of global mining at TD Securities. Mr. McCreary was forced out of Barrick in August, when new Barrick chairman John Thornton dismantled the corporate development team. Mr. Thornton was leading a reorganization that saw several senior Barrick executives leave, including the company's CEO.
Three years earlier, in 2011, Mr. McCreary had left his post as head of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce's mining investment banking group to join Barrick to lead a team scouring the world for new assets. He had long been regarded as one of Canada's top investment bankers in the mining sector. (He previously worked at TD from 1997 to 2003.)
Mr. McCreary rejoins TD at a difficult period in the mining industry and at a time when very few merger-and-acquisition deals have succeeded. Many companies tried to sell mines last year and had to take them off the market when they failed to get the desired price.
In an interview, he sounded a cautiously optimistic note about mining deals, pointing out that so far in 2015, a billion dollars has been raised in the previous metals sector and Vancouver-based GoldCorp Inc. has moved to divest some assets: "You can see some light by activity over the last month or so. ... It's always hard to call."
He would say only positive things about his three years at Barrick, which gave him what he described as an invaluable perspective on the industry: "I had a wonderful experience there. It's a great company. There's lots of change obviously occurring there. I am so happy for the experience that I had there. I would say I am better positioned than arguably others, now that I have seen it from the inside."
Before his time at Barrick and CIBC, Mr. McCreary spent some of his early career working with the Noranda Inc. and Falconbridge Ltd. mining group.
With a report from Rachelle Younglai
Jeff Gray