Geneva Cuts 40 Jobs Due to Fewer Deals : Layoffs: Merger and acquisition firm says the softened economy is affecting business. Most reductions were in Irvine.

Geneva Cos., a merger and acquisition company, said Tuesday that it has eliminated 40 of its nearly 450 jobs as the number of deals has dwindled.

The company said most of the jobs cut were at its Irvine headquarters, where employees were laid off last week. Geneva also has three offices and a training facility in the East.

“It was basically a business decision that had to be made to meet our current level of activity and the level we expect in 1991,” said William L. Ricci, the company’s senior vice president for human resources.

Geneva specializes in arranging sales and mergers for mid-sized companies with yearly revenue of between $1 million and $100 million. With the nation’s economy softening and talk of a recession, those deals are occurring less frequently.

While many financial-services firms have been shedding employees since the 1987 stock market crash, Geneva said as recently as March that it was adding a corporate finance department. Geneva said then that it was prospering because it didn’t engage in hostile takeovers.

In late 1988, the company was growing at more than a 40% annual clip and created two new units to help with the workload. Earlier that year, Geneva signed a $30-million lease--one of the largest in Orange County--for five floors of a 20-story Irvine Co. building at Jamboree Center in Irvine.

Based on a count of “tombstone” ads in the Wall Street Journal--announcements of completed mergers and acquisitions--Geneva ranked as the industry’s largest deal maker in 1987 and 1988. Experts have said, however, that the total dollar amount involved in Geneva’s deals was probably smaller than that of larger firms that put together fewer but bigger deals.

Geneva is owned by a subsidiary of Chemical Banking, which also owns New York’s Chemical Bank.

Ricci said additional layoffs are unlikely.

“At this juncture,” he said, “management is comfortable with the level of staffing we have.”