The Asian project finance market welcomed back an old friend this week on the news that William Rathvon had returned to Asia. He has joined Standard Charered as global head of project and export finance. He will be based in Singapore and will establish a team that will develop a new project finance business for Standard Chartered.

Rathvon used to run Bank of America's regional project finance team with a special emphasis on petrochemical and oil and gas projects. He left Hong Kong in 1997 but stayed with Bank of America. Most recently he was a managing director in the energy investment banking group for the bank, based in Houston and doing M&A and corporate finance deals for oil, gas and petrochemcial clients.

He arrived in Singapore on Monday and reports to V. Shankar, group head of corporate finance at Standard Chartered, Singapore. "The creation of a project finance team is in line with our strategy to expand on the range of financing solutions that we can offer clients across our markets," says Shankar. "William will play an important role in developing our project finance business and integrating it with our strong structured export finance capabilities globally."