Jan. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Merrill Lynch & Co.’s co-head of European markets, Brent Clapacs, will step down, joining the brokerage head, general counsel and a vice chairman in departing after the firm agreed to be taken over by Bank of America Corp.

Bank of America is installing managers and cutting as many as 35,000 jobs after completing its takeover of Merrill last week. Merrill agreed in September to be purchased by Bank of America, the largest U.S. bank by assets, after posting about $50 billion of losses and writedowns related to the collapse of the U.S. subprime mortgage market.

“A lot of people are going to cash their chips in at this point,” said Nigel Nicholson, a professor of business leadership at the London Business School. “The old investment banking world is gone in effect and it’s unclear how fond some bankers will be of these giant houses.”

The difficulty of integrating Merrill Lynch contributed to Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America’s credit ratings being cut today by Moody’s Investors Service. The bank’s tradition of imposing systems on acquired companies “carries a greater risk of employee defections,” Moody’s said in a report.

Clapacs, named to his latest job last week, is retiring to move back to the U.S. from London with his family, Global Markets head Tom Montag said in a memo to employees yesterday. Mike Stewart, co-head of global equities with Tom Patrick, will move to London and oversee Clapacs’s role for now. A London-based spokeswoman for the bank confirmed the memo, and declined to comment further.

17-Year Career

Clapacs, 45, who took over as co-head of the European markets group with David Gu on Jan. 1, has held a series of jobs in his 17-year career at Merrill, including head of European equities for the past three years. He was previously co-head of the global equity-linked business, based in New York, and ran equity trading in the Pacific Rim from Hong Kong.

Stewart, a Merrill veteran, took over as head of global equities with Patrick on Jan. 1. They both report to Montag, as do Clapacs and Gu.

Clapacs announced his departure a day after Merrill’s brokerage head Bob McCann said he would leave. McCann, who worked at Merrill for 26 years, will be replaced by Daniel C. Sontag, a 30-year veteran who reported to McCann as head of Merrill’s brokerage operations in the U.S. and Latin America.

Other senior Merrill executives departing the bank include General Counsel Rosemary Berkery and Vice Chairman Jeff Edwards.

Bank of America last month dismissed about 20 senior executives, many of them two reporting levels below Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Lewis. It was the bank’s broadest executive-level job cut in memory, said Tony Plath, a finance professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Merrill’s equity markets revenue fell 19 percent in the third quarter, excluding one-time gains and losses, the company said in October.

-- Editor: Edward Evans, Dan Kraut

To contact the reporters on this story: Jacqueline Simmons in Paris at to jackiem@bloomberg.net; David Mildenberg in Charlotte at dmildenberg@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: January 8, 2009 12:41 EST