Southern Company Energy Marketing – the marketing joint ventureof Southern Company unit Southern Energy and Vastar Resources’Vastar Gas Marketing and Vastar Power Marketing — plans to movesome of its Houston employees, mainly traders, to its Atlantaoffice.

Houston-based cash gas trading activities will move to Atlantato join the company’s other trading activities in gas and power. Other employees besides traders will be moving as well. “It has yetto be determined exactly who and how many will move,” a spokesmansaid. “It’s one of these things we’ll see how market conditionsdevelop over the next year.”

The decision was made last month, and the target date for thebeginning of the move is next fall, when an Atlanta trading flooris expected to be ready. Southern Company Energy Marketing hasabout 400 employees, about 120 are currently in Houston, 270 inAtlanta and a handful at offices in California and Massachusetts. Remaining in Houston will be the company’s financing arm, EnergyCapital, which has about a dozen Houston employees. Improvedefficiency is the reason for the change, the spokesman said. Hesaid the company will add to its Atlanta staff, but numbers and atime frame were not yet known.

Joe Fisher, Houston

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