Richard Handler was only 38  in 1999 when when he persuaded Jefferies Group Inc. board to make him chief executive officer.  By 2002, Handler was both CEO and chairman.  Since then, the former bond trader and salesman, has transformed the Wall Street equity-trading shop into a full- scale investment bank.  Jefferies has more than tripled its workforce and revenue, joining New York’s top 10 mergers-and-acquisitions advisers.  He acquired entire teams to strengthen advisory and research coverage and hired rainmakers from some of his biggest competitors.  With Handler at the helm, Jefferies’s balance sheet has increased more than 10-fold to $45.1 billion. The firm’s net revenue in fiscal 2010, an 11-month period, was more than triple the figure for all of 2000. Handler himself has vaulted from highest-paid producer to biggest individual shareholder. He owns a bigger share of his company than the CEOs at the biggest Wall Street banks, with a 6 percent stake that dwarfs the 0.43 percent Lloyd Blankfein holds in Goldman Sachs and the 0.05 percent of Morgan Stanley’s James Gorman according to data compiled by Bloomberg.   Handler’s shares are valued at about $149 million. Now Handler is defending the company he built, aiming to retain staff amid investor concern that Europe’s debt crisis and the collapse of MF Global Holdings will drive up financing costs or lead to losses. Tomorrow, with its stock down 54 percent this year, Jefferies announces quarterly results. After eschewing investor conferences and television interviews that are routine for some Wall Street heads, Handler has spent the past month revealing details about his firm’s books. “He’s an intensely private guy,” said Joseph Schenk, who served as Jefferies’s finance chief for eight years through 2007. “He’s responding to the fact that nobody was standing up, and he was prepared to stand up.” Handler, 50, is doing what executives at Bear Stearns Cos. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. refused to do, even when they were on the brink of collapse in 2008. After Egan-Jones Ratings Co. expressed concern that Jefferies may face losses linked to sovereign debt, Handler described the firm’s holdings and hedges in interviews and almost daily statements. He published a breakdown of Jefferies’s sovereign bonds, and days later sold half of those assets to prove they were liquid.   As market rumors persisted, the CEO compiled what he called “malicious lies” in a Nov. 21 letter and gave a point- by-point response. Jefferies has rallied 21 percent since. While “fragile market confidence” likely will continue weighing on Jefferies’s stock price and bond spreads, the company has amassed enough liquidity to weather debt-market turmoil, Fitch Ratings said in a Dec. 6 report. “It’s never been about me,” Handler said in a statement. “It’s been about the 3,898 of us at Jefferies who worked as hard as possible throughout November to get the truth out to address misinformation, which can become a reality in dangerous times. It’s been about all of us caring passionately about our company and being keenly aware of the enormous responsibility we have to our shareholders, bondholders and clients.” Handler disclosed a retention policy to employees last week, telling workers that the firm would claw back 2011 bonuses from anyone who defects to competitors in the coming year. Normally, such measures “don’t really work” because the hiring firm reimburses the amount forfeited, David Trone, an analyst for JMP Securities LLC, wrote in a note to clients. Now, with few Wall Street firms adding talent, “employees likely have few alternatives.” In interviews with more than a dozen past and present colleagues, Handler was described as being focused on work and uninterested in public stature. Jefferies has given about $25 million to charity since Handler became CEO, aiding victims of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Even as Handler thrust himself into the public spotlight to defend his firm, he keeps a low profile. The CEO, a fan of the New York Giants football team, is rarely seen wearing a tie, according to colleagues, and usually doesn’t present at investor conferences. He and his wife, who have a daughter and three sons, live in South Salem, New York, a hamlet about 50 miles north of midtown Manhattan, colleagues said. Handler will have to continue being transparent to maintain investor confidence, said Davia Temin, CEO of Temin & Co., a New York-based crisis-consulting firm. “They’ve gone out on a limb, they’ve got to stay the course,” she said. He could “be known as somebody who fought a fight that others have lost.”  For more info, go to [Bloomberg 12/19/11]