Moody's names Polanski to oversee troubled structured finance business

Moody's Investors Service has named Jonathan Polansky as its first global structured finance surveillance co-ordinator.

Like other ratings agencies, Moody's has come under heavy fire recently for its ratings of structured products. It has now named Polansky, currently group managing director of its asset finance group, as structured finance global surveillance co-ordinator, responsible for overseeing existing Moody's ratings on structured deals, including asset-backed and mortgage-backed securities and derivatives. He will be based in New York.

Polansky was in charge of Moody's collateralised debt obligation surveillance from 2003 to 2005, and team managing director from 2005 to 2008. In April this year, he took the lead in blaming the failures of the credit rating process on poor information supplied by the issuers - although his colleague Noel Kirnon, head of global structured finance, had already admitted that the rating process itself could have been more transparent.

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