Craig Schiffer | Ex-Lehman exec, 58

Craig Schiffer, 58, who held global leadership roles at Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc., Nomura International and Dresdner Kleinwort during a 35-year career in finance, died Tuesday after being caught in an avalanche while skiing in Grenoble, France, according to his daughter, Jessica Schiffer.

A resident of Summit, N.J., Mr. Schiffer had a vacation home outside Annecy, France, about 66 miles north of Grenoble, and was there on a ski trip with some of his children.

He was buried in snow for 15 minutes and died en route to a hospital, Edwin McGuinn, a former Lehman colleague, said in a telephone interview. Mr. Schiffer's children and their ski guide survived.

During 18 years at Lehman Bros., from 1978 to 1996, Mr. Schiffer held positions including global head of equity derivatives, global head of fixed-income derivatives and head of high-yield sales, according to an online biography.

During his time at Nomura International in London, from 1997 to 2000, Mr. Schiffer ran the "highly profitable proprietary arbitrage group" until a restructuring in November 1998, Global Capital Euroweek reported. He then moved to the debt division of the unit of Japan-based Nomura Holdings Inc.

In Global Capital Euroweek, Mr. Schiffer was described in 2000 by columnist Ian Kerr as "the fun-loving senior non-Japanese head of Nomura's capital markets division in Europe." The banker, Kerr wrote, appeared to be "just the person to restore law and order" after the departure of Simon Fry, Nomura's head of international markets.

Instead, Mr. Schiffer quit Nomura and landed six months later at the London office of Dresdner Kleinwort - then called Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein - as a managing director to help expand its international debt business.

He moved to New York as head of North American capital markets at Dresdner Kleinwort. From 2003 to 2006, he was the New York-based chief executive for the Americas.

Dresdner Kleinwort was acquired by Frankfurt-based Commerzbank AG in 2009.

That year, Mr. Schiffer opened Sevara Partners, a New York-based adviser to investors and companies. A year ago, McGuinn said, Schiffer joined Cowen Group, where he was helping to develop an alternative investing platform.

Craig Howard Schiffer was born on Aug. 25, 1956, in Cleveland, to Chuck Schiffer, a real estate developer and general contractor, and the former Carol Polinsky. He graduated in 1978 from the University of California at Santa Cruz, with a bachelor's degree in history.

- Bloomberg