March 16 (Bloomberg) -- Evercore Partners Inc., the investment bank founded by former U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman, set up an advisory and investment venture with Citic Securities Co., China’s biggest securities firm by market value, to gain more mergers and acquisitions work in the country.

Former Bear Stearns Cos. Vice Chairman Donald Tang will be chief executive officer of the new company, to be named Citic Securities International Partners, New York-based Evercore said in a statement. The venture will focus on generating deals between Chinese and overseas companies, the firms said.

The agreement gives Evercore access to an M&A market that kept growing last year even as the credit crisis caused a 38 percent drop in the value of transactions globally. The value of mergers involving Chinese companies reached a record $190 billion last year, double the level of 2006, as domestic firms bought assets abroad, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The venture “facilitates our clients’ access to the Chinese market,” Altman, 62, said in the statement. “It also makes significant headway towards Evercore’s goal of further globalizing our business.”

Citic Group, parent of Citic Securities, was established in October 1979 with the approval of the reformist, former Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping as a platform for China to expand overseas. To date, it has mainly focused on running banks, securities, insurance, trust and funds businesses.

Bear Stearns

Tang formerly worked at Bear Stearns. There, he helped negotiate a partnership with Citic Securities in which the firms would invest $1 billion in each other and team up to sell financial services in China. That agreement, reached in 2007, fell through as Bear Stearns neared collapse. JPMorgan Chase & Co. bought Bear Stearns in March 2008, and Tang left JPMorgan seven months later.

He started developing the Citic venture at least six months ago, and has also held talks with CV Starr & Co., an investment fund owned by Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, about a possible investment, two people familiar with the matter said. Tang and Greenberg declined to comment.

The new company also plans to set up a $500 million private equity fund, backed mainly by its shareholders, one of the people said. Citic Securities will be the venture’s majority owner, the person said without being more specific. Some shares will be set aside for employee stock options, the person said.

New York-based Evercore, with 335 employees and six offices in North America and London, advises on mergers and acquisitions and restructuring. The firm posted an $8.5 million fourth- quarter loss as global mergers slowed to $419 billion in the last three months of 2008, the slowest since the third quarter of 2004. Evercore is advising General Motors Corp., the biggest U.S. automaker, on its restructuring, and counseling Wyeth on the drugmaker’s $68 billion sale to Pfizer Inc.

To contact the reporters on this story: Cathy Chan in Hong Kong at Kchan14@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: March 16, 2009 05:12 EDT