Two staff working for Dillon Read Capital Management, the UBS hedge fund run by the investment bank's former chief executive John Costas, joined after shutting their hedge fund six months after forming it.

Vijay Sharma and Michael Pintar, managing directors at Dillon Read, set up Protean Capital Partners, a global macro fixed-income hedge fund, last September but closed it in March. Sharma and Pintar, former Deutsche Bank colleagues who also worked together at New York hedge fund Clinton Group, were taken on by Dillon Read less than a month after shutting Protean, according to the register of the Financial Services Authority, the UK regulator. Gordon Alexander, a former Royal Bank of Scotland banker and the third member of Protean's partnership, joined Wadhwani Asset Management, the hedge fund of former Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee member Sushil Wadhwani, as its chief operating officer. Protean never filed accounts with the UK's Companies House. Market sources said UBS had not bought Protean. A UBS spokesman in New York was contacted but declined to comment.