Mark Levinson has become head of the Goldman Sachs Partners transition management group, two years after joining the firm, following the departure of his predecessor.

It is understood that Mark Wills, an equity owner in Goldman Sachs’ Australian business, left last month. Transitions industry observers said it had been a case of ‘too many chiefs’ ever since Levinson arrived in April 2008 from Citi, where at one stage his team held a 90 per cent share of the institutional investor transitions market.

It is understood that Levinson himself is now a partner in the local Goldman Sachs business, which is owned 55 per cent by Australian executives and 45 per cent by the global Goldman Sachs group.

In other transitions news, it is understood that Elliot Graham has eschewed a renewal of his contract researching transition brokers and managers for FuturePlus, in preference for a full-time role doing similar work for Mercer Sentinel. Mercer runs a project management approach to transitions, farming out the actual trading to brokers on an auction basis, but providing all the pre-trade and post-trade reporting and planning itself.

The chief investment officer at FuturePlus, Michael Block, said Graham would not be replaced, owing to the current uncertainty around the manager’s future structure, as Local Government Super Scheme sells its stake in the business to Energy Industries Superannuation Scheme.