Scipion Capital has hired three commodity finance specialists to strengthen its legal division, operations and corporate governance.

David Butler joins as non-executive director, UK. His early career includes roles as a senior tax manager at Deloitte and EY, before being appointed partner at RSM Robson Rhodes London. He then founded Kinetic Partners, an alternative asset management firm offering risk management, audit, regulatory, tax, forensic, insolvency and consulting services, in 2005.

Butler retired from Kinetic in 2013, after which he was appointed to the boards of several hedge fund management and other financial services firms.

Neil Tuckwell (pictured) joins as head of operations, bringing with him almost 30 years’ experience in the commodity trade finance sphere. He was most recently senior transaction management officer in the middle office at FBN Bank (UK), before which he spent eight years working at soft commodity trading companies including Armajaro Trading and Tate & Lyle Sugars Europe, where he was involved in a number of structured and vanilla trade finance operations covering cocoa, coffee and sugar.

International financial lawyer Myriam Ly has been hired as general counsel to oversee all of the group’s legal matters. She joins from Schulte Roth & Zabel International, where her practice focused on the establishment and structuring of hedge funds.

According to Scipion, these hires are a testimony of the firm’s growth over the last two years, during which it also strengthened its investment, marketing, investor relations and compliance teams, as a response to the investor interest in the global commodity trade industry.

Nicolas Clavel, chief investment officer says: “We are getting traction for our strategies with a more and more diversified range of investors, both in terms of type and region of origin. In this context, we aim to leverage our track record and success to give the company the structure its fast-growing size now requires.”