PEOPLE.

Newsmakers

Accounting & Consulting

Michael S. Hearne has joined the firm of Rothstein, Kass & Co. as a principal. He will be located in Beverly Hills and will be leading the firm's West Coast tax practice, which includes the San Francisco and Walnut Creek offices. Most recently, Hearne served as a senior tax manager for PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Dennis G. Krock, Paul M. Sachs and Samuel N. Simpson have all been promoted in the Los Angeles office of Arthur Andersen. Krock, who specializes in corporate taxation and transactional tax planning, will supervise the practice for offices in Southern California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and Hawaii. Sachs will be head of the business risk consulting practice for the Pacific Southwest region. He will lead 150 professionals in the region who specialize in risk management in areas such as technology, business processes and controls, treasury and commodity risks, fraud and integrity risks and industry- and market-specific risk. Simpson is now a principal and will be working with the firm's state and local tax practice, where he will advise clients in the financial services and utilities industries on tax planning strategies and tax preparation.

Advertising & P.R.

Rebecca Gallegos has been appointed director of publicity for Levine Communications in Los Angeles. Her duties include overseeing the publicity staff, development of campaign strategies and implementing all public relations events for clients and corporations. Gallegos was formerly with the Orange County Register newspaper, where she handled large-scale events.

David Vipond has been promoted to the new post of vice president and account supervisor in the advertising group of Pittard Sullivan, an entertainment marketing communications company in Culver City. He will supervise all of the department's active accounts, as well as oversee all media planning and buying services on behalf of the company's clients. Vipond was a senior account manager before being promoted.

Banking & Finance

Steve Beilinson has been promoted to senior vice president at Sanwa Bank California in Los Angeles. Beilinson will also be the credit supervisor and team leader of the commercial credit group for Sanwa's southern commercial banking region, and will have credit responsibility for the more than $1.8 billion middle-market portfolio. He was vice president of the commercial group before his promotion.

Louis Chen has been named chief information officer at Houlihan Lokey Howard & Zukin, an international investment bank headquartered in Los Angeles. He will be responsible for overseeing all projects related to the bank's information technology group, as well as providing technical support and recommendations to the firm's technology financial staff. Prior to joining Houlihan Lokey, Chen served as vice president of information technology and network operations at oCen Communications.

Education

Todd Richmond has been named managing director of the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC. He will further the center's mission to attract and fund research initiatives in the fields of communications theory and practice in addition to working toward fostering collaboration among USC scholars. Richmond was formerly a professor of chemistry at Claremont Colleges, where he sought early on to incorporate multimedia and Web technologies in his teaching.

Entertainment

Catherine Finkenstaedt and Kim Dellara have been hired to head Extension Films, a new music video division of Propaganda Films, as executive producers. The pair will be charged with bringing young, commercially viable directors into the Propaganda fold and building their careers in multiple disciplines and media. Most recently Finkenstaedt was executive in charge of music video production at A Band Apart. Dellara was a directors' representative at the same company.

Erika Grenadier has joined Fireworks Television as manager of development. She will be responsible for developing drama and children's series as well as handling current production on several of Fireworks' hour-long dramas. Most recently, Grenadier was at Columbia Tri-Star Television Distribution.

Barry Snyder has been appointed president of Post Logic Studios, a post-production studio in Hollywood. He will be responsible for expanding and diversifying the roster of clients, and more specifically, immediately escalating Post Logic's feature film, audio/visual effects, high definition, Internet and DVD activities. Snyder was vice president of post-production at Warner Bros. before accepting his new position.

Health Care

John V. Fenton has been named president and chief executive of the City of Angels Medical Center. In addition to being responsible for all financial and managerial aspects, he will oversee the growth and development of the facility. Fenton was most recently president and CEO of Queen of Angels-Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center.

Law

Steven L. Hoch has been hired to head the new Los Angeles office of Hatch and Parent, a law firm based in Santa Barbara. Hoch will be practicing environmental law and litigation, representing current clients and attempting to attract others through his expertise. He formerly chaired Haight, Brown & Bonesteel's earth and health science practice group.

Allan T. Marks has been named a partner in the Los Angeles office of Millbank, Tweed, Haley & McCloy LLP. He is a member of the firm's global project finance group and represents companies involved in telecommunications, high tech, energy, transportation and natural resources. Previously, Marks was an associate with the firm.

New Media

Paul Galleberg has been appointed senior vice president and general counsel at Infonet Service Corp., a global communications services provider in El Segundo. Galleberg specializes in the general representation of communications, venture and technology companies. He was most recently a partner at Latham & Watkins.

Claudine Grier, Patrick Daniel and Rob Edenzon have been added to the management team of SBASoft, a business intelligence application service provider in North Hollywood. Grier has been named vice president of business development. She will be responsible for identifying, creating and managing business relationships with select companies to develop solutions and complementary services. Prior. to joining SBASoft, Grier helped establish Microsoft's Southern California e-business unit. Daniel, the new vice president of engineering at SBASoft, is in charge of hardware and software architecture, data center build-out, and network engineering. He served as Digital Island's director of worldwide deployment before joining the company. Edenzon, in his role as vice president of sales and marketing, is in charge of developing and implementing the sales and marketing strategies for SBASoft. Most recently, he developed the sales strategy for TriVida Corp.

Alexander Hansen has been named chief financial officer of Quisic, an e-learning company in Los Angeles. He has been added in the midst of a company effort to develop and deliver management training and education solutions for the global marketplace. Formerly, he was CFO for the B2B entertainment Web site, CreativePlanet.

Real Estate

John S. Archibald has been promoted to vice president of real estate advisory services at the Los Angeles office of Grubb & Ellis Co. He specializes in the sales and leasing of commercial real estate in downtown Los Angeles. Previously, he was an associate vice president.

Telecommunications

Alan Morse has joined broadband telecommunications provider Telepacific Communications as senior vice president of regional management. He will focus primarily on development and implementation of product, marketing, sales and back-office strategies. Most recently, Morse worked for Sprint PCS as area vice president/general manager for the Ohio, Indiana and Pittsburgh markets. Also joining Telepacific is Norman Racine, who will be the chief information officer. As CIO, Racine will set the overall information technology and information systems directions for the company. He was most recently a senior consultant for LTC International.

Ng Named New Los Angeles Chairman of United Way

Los Angeles has been trailing other big U.S. cities in terms of United Way donations, and as the newly named chair of the 2000-01 campaign for United Way of Greater Los Angeles, Dominic Ng, aims to improve that situation.

Ng -- whose full-time job is president and CEO of East West Bank, said he plans to accomplish that by broadening the donor base beyond tradition sources.

"There are a lot of emerging companies that have never been on the radar screens of the United Way," Ng said. "Every year, we always have companies relocating or layoffs, and we always end up losing a bit of the base of traditional donors. In addition to getting support from the traditional corporations, we have to go out and identify emerging companies."

A Chinese native of Hong Kong, the 41-year-old Ng is the first minority business leader tapped to head United Way's annual L.A. campaign.

Although the L.A. fund-raising goal of $65 million for the current campaign is $5 million more than the amount United Way raised in L.A. during the fiscal year ended July 31, 2000, it remains well behind other U.S. cities of similar size, which Ng attributes largely to L.A.'s diverse economy.

Another difficulty, according to Ng, is that the constituencies that United Way supports (e.g., the working poor) lack the "sex appeal" of some other charitable efforts, such as those aimed at combating a fatal disease.

"For United Way, it is a bit of a challenge," he said. "The L.A. community's more willing to give if they hear the right pitch."

To craft that "right pitch," Ng plans to focus on issues that were identified through discussions with a task force comprised of representatives from local governments, communities, corporations and educational institutions. The task force, which Ng chaired, identified three key issues of concern: transcending the cycle of poverty, improving childhood learning and youth and adult literacy, and building healthy communities.

If Ng's track record at East West Bank is any indication, he may have a good shot at hitting his United Way goals. Under his leadership, East West Bank has tripled its asset size to $2.4 billion. Ng is projecting that the bank will be the third-largest bank in Los Angeles in 2001.

Christopher Keough