ON THE MOVE-Veteran U.S. brokerage lawyer McKay to join Barclays

By Jed Horowitz

NEW YORK, Feb 25 (Reuters) - Kevin McKay, who began his Wall Street legal career in 1978 at E.F. Hutton, will join Barclays (Hanover: BCY.HA - news) PLC's wealth and investment management division in the Americas next month as general counsel, a company spokeswoman said on Wednesday.

For the past 12 years McKay was general counsel of Dominick & Dominick, a New York City broker-dealer with fewer than 50 brokers that was purchased in January by Memphis, Tennessee-based Wunderlich Securities. He was briefly chief executive of the New York-based firm before the deal, and retained the general counsel title at Wunderlich.

"It's been a memorable journey," McKay wrote in a memo to Dominick employees, adding that he accepted Barclays (LSE: BARC.L - news) ' offer "after much tortured thought."

Barclays' U.S. wealth business is small and recovering from scandals that led to management overhauls at the British bank and in its wealth unit.

The bank's former chief executive, Robert Diamond, resigned in 2012 after Barclays agreed to pay British and U.S. regulators $453 million for rigging the London Interbank Offered Rate, the first bank implicated in the scandal. Mitch Cox, the head of wealth in the Americas, left the bank in 2013 after an internal report identified an abusive "revenue-at-all costs" culture in its U.S. business.

Two months before his departure, Cox told Reuters that Barclays was investing $500 million to increase the wealth business to 400 brokers from 250 by the end of 2014 and to focus on selling loans and exotic investments to people with at least $10 million of assets. It now has closer to 200 brokers.

McKay, 65, was general counsel of Prudential Securities when it paid $371 million in 1993 to settle charges of improperly selling limited partnerships to retail investors. From 1994 to 2002, he was general counsel of Tucker Anthony Sutro, a period when its management bought the firm from John Hancock Financial, took it public and subsequently resold it to Royal Bank of Canada.

At Barclays, he will report to Helen Oldfied, the bank's London-based global general counsel. He will be based in New (KOSDAQ: 160550.KQ - news) York, reporting on a dotted-line basis to wealth management Americas head Tom Lee, who replaced Cox.

McKay, whose move has not been previously reported, did not return calls for comment. Wunderlich officials did not immediately return calls to say whether he will be replaced.

He replaces Carlos Pelayo, a former Lehman Brothers and Barclays lawyer. (Reporting by Jed Horowitz; Editing by Paul Simao)