Sterling Financial Investment Group Expands Syndicate Department.

Business Editors

Sterling Financial Investment Group, Inc., the Boca Raton based investment bank, specializing in the healthcare and biotech sectors that covers more than 60 companies, and is one of the few brokerage firms in the country that regularly publishes "short sell" recommendations on companies it covers, announces the recent hire of Anthony L. Gaus as Managing Director and Head of the Syndicate Department at Sterling Financial.

A more than 30-year veteran, Gaus has been associated with some of the nation's largest and most respected investment banks and brokerage firms. For more than 10 years, Gaus managed the Syndicate Department at Drexel Burnham Lambert, Inc., in New York City, where he was instrumental in originating new equity issuance, and managed a team of 14 syndicate professionals. For most of the 90s, Gaus was Executive Vice President of Mesirow Financial, Inc's Chicago office where he directed all underwriting activities, including deal origination and also serving as deal manager. Most recently, Gaus was a Director at Suntrust Equitable Securities and Head of Syndicate, where he concentrated on increasing name recognition and branding of the firm to larger national market syndicate players.

"A successful syndicate department is critical to further developing and growing the Sterling name, expanding our range of services, providing our brokers with an enhanced product line, and increasing our revenues," says Alexis Korybut, President of Sterling Financial Investment Group, "Tony brings a tremendous wealth of experience in deal syndication and origination to the firm, which also benefits our retail brokers and institutional salespeople by enabling us to offer interesting investment products to our clients."

"In the kind of challenging times we are facing in the stock market, investors are looking for new and different investment opportunities," says Gaus, "Sterling has created an exceptional name in the market, not only in the industry, but also with the consumer." Gaus also points out that, "An experienced syndicate department will allow Sterling Financial not only to get into a wide range of exciting deals, but also, because the firm is one of the few minority owned/Hispanic investment banks in the country, having recently earned state certification as a Minority Business Enterprise (MBE), will act as a tremendous door-opener to larger firms who want to include highly professional minority firms as part of their syndicate offerings."

Gaus joins Carlo Corzine, a Director of the Syndicate Department, under whose direction Sterling has been involved in 87 equity offerings in the past three and one half years. This year alone, Sterling has been underwriters in 6 offerings, participating in deals with some of the world's premier investment banks, including Salomon Smith Barney, CS first Boston, U.S. Bancorp and UBS Warburg, among others.

Shortly after receiving state certification as a Minority Business Enterprise (MBE) Sterling Financial Sterling Financial partnered for its first syndicate deal with Salomon Smith Barney, the state's leader in public financing projects, as a Co-Manager for a proposed $250 million Certificates of Participation for a Palm Beach County School District construction project. "Our fixed income group executes over $5 billion in bonds per month, and this was a logical extension of our business growth," says Charles Patrick Garcia, Sterling Financial's founder and Chairman, a Panamanian American who has earned numerous accolades throughout the Hispanic community domestically and internationally for his company's meteoric rise in the financial services community and its success as a minority owned firm.

In July, Garcia, who is both a Gubernatorial and Presidential appointee to two high profile governmental positions on education in Florida and nationally, was named as a finalist in this years Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the year award in Florida in the Financial Services Category. Last year Garcia was named by Hispanic Business magazine as one of the Top 100 Most Influential Hispanics in the country and for the past two years (2001 and 2000) Sterling Financial has been named the fastest growing privately held company in the State of Florida by the University of Florida Fischer School of Accounting and also as the state's fastest growing minority owned firm for both years.

Sterling Financial Website: http://www.mysterling.com