The credit crunch has claimed another high-profile casualty, with the departure of Thomas Maheras from Citigroup in the wake of a $1.9 billion (£930 million) loss at the fixed-income division that he ran for the world’s largest bank.

Mr Maheras left Citigroup after Vikram Pandit, head of the group’s alternative investments division, was brought in over him to run a newly created unit.

The so-called institutional clients unit, announced yesterday, combines the investment banking division, co-headed by Mr Maheras, with Mr Pandit’s hedge fund business. Mr Pandit said: “These are interrelated businesses and they have the same clients. They need the same infrastruc-ture and our view is that if they run on an integrated basis we can accelerate the growth.”

Losses on bonds backed by high-risk, sub-prime mortgages were a significant contributor to a $5.9 billion write-off that Citigroup announced this month, which will push its third-quarter profit down by about 60 per cent from the year before.

Mr Maheras left after a review of Citigroup’s fixed-income division that led to the departure of Randolph H. Barker, one of his top lieutenants, and the reassignment of Geoffrey Coley, Mr Barker’s partner, who was given unspecified new responsibilities.

The departure of Mr Maheras, a 23-year veteran of Citigroup, brought renewed calls for Charles Prince, the group’s chief executive, to step down. Investor calls for Mr Prince’s resignation, in the face of burgeoning costs and a stagnating share price, intensified this month when Citigroup announced a profit warning.

Mike Mayo, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, said yesterday: “We feel that changes are needed in the office of the chairman. New news to restructure the investment bank means that [those] changes are unlikely to be forthcoming.” Mr Mayo yesterday downgraded his recommendation on the bank’s shares from “buy” to “sell”, complaining about a “widely reported investor dissatisfaction with senior management yet a continued absence of change”.

Robert Rubin, a Citigroup director, said: “I think Chuck [Prince] is going to be here for a lot of years. It’s not an issue we’re going to have to face for a long time.”

Mr Maheras’s departure came after a string of high-profile departures at rival banks as, one by one, they announce huge writedowns relating to the credit crunch.

In the past few weeks, Warren Spector has left his position as Bear Stearns’s co-president, Osman Semerci has departed his post as global head of Merrill Lynch’s fixed-income division and Peter Wuffli has left the chief executive role at UBS.

UBS also said this week that David Martin and James Stehli, respectively global head of interest-rate products and head of collateralised debt obligations will leave the bank.

However, these high-profile departures account for only a tiny percentage of the 130,000 American jobs that have been lost in financial services in the first half of this year, many of them related to the mortgage meltdown.

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