OVS Capital, the investment manager which focuses on European equity event-driven strategies, has appointed Nitin Sharma to its investment team, while it also announced  the promotion of Manuel Blanco to partner.

Sharma joins OVS as an analyst from Centaurus Capital, where he previously served as an equity analyst at Brevan Howard and Ivaldi Capital. In these roles he focused on bottom-up fundamental stock analysis and equity and event driven situations. Prior to this, he was an analyst at UBS in the firm’s corporate finance team, and from 2004 to 2007 he served in McKinsey & Company’s corporate finance team.

Sharma’s hire takes OVS’s investment team to five people supported by a six-strong business and operations team.

Blanco, who joined OVS as an Analyst in March 2012, has been promoted to Partner.  Blanco previously served as a senior equity analyst at Trafalgar Asset Managers, the multi-billion dollar event driven fund where his responsibilities included idea generation, analysis and trade construction across a range of hard and soft catalyst trades. Before that, Blanco served in Citigroup’s UK based investment banking team in the Financial Sponsors Group, overseeing multiple private and public transactions.

OVS Capital was founded by Sam Morland, who formerly spent ten years at HBK, a Dallas-based hedge fund manager.