Aug. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Bill Moss, the former head of banking and property at Macquarie Group Ltd., and Glenn Willis, ex- managing director of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in Australia, teamed up to start an advisory and funds management firm.

Moss Capital, based in Sydney, will specialize in debt and equity financing, corporate and real estate advice, and funds management, the company said in an e-mailed statement.

“With the road to economic recovery typically complex and challenging, I am anticipating that many major players in the Australian market will need to be recapitalized and restructured over the next 12 to 24 months,” Moss, chairman of the firm, said in the statement.

Moss, 55, started Macquarie’s property unit in 1984 and helped it increase investments to over A$25 billion ($21 billion). Willis, 48, chief executive officer of Moss Capital, co-founded Grange Securities in 1995, and became Lehman’s Australian managing director in 2007 when the now-failed Wall Street firm took over Grange.

Moss Capital is working on property deals across three continents and has just completed refinancing more than A$200 million worth of debt for a “well-known” international company operating in Australia which it didn’t identify, it said.

“The focus will be domestic, but business is cross-border these days and you can’t be single jurisdictional,” Willis said in a telephone interview.

The firm has a team of about 10 staff at the moment, mainly made up of Moss and Willis’s former colleagues at Macquarie and Lehman, Willis said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Malcolm Scott in Sydney at Mscott23@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: August 3, 2009 21:53 EDT