Nomura reported its second quarter results yesterday, and they were very respectable.

The bank turned a loss of 154bn yen for the first half of 2008 into a profit of 154bn yen for the first half of 2009. It declared, “another solid step in our drive to become a truly global investment bank,” and said it was reaping big benefits from the Lehman Business.

Does this mean all those disgruntled legacy Nomura people who allegedly felt wronged by the merger have melted away into contented oblivion? And does it mean that all those Lehman people who were predicted to disappear the moment they’d cashed their (generous) guaranteed bonuses are staying around? Apparently so.

One Nomura insider (who is admittedly ex-Lehman), says it’s frankly been one happy family all along: “The transition has been very easy. We’re in a very good place – and have been since we joined Nomura. I’ve asked a lot of people who all these unhappy people are that the press keeps talking about, and no one seems to know.”

However, headhunters say that if former Lehman staff are very happy at Nomura, it’s because they’ve got the upper hand.

“There are very few Nomura people left in investment banking areas,” says one. “Most of them were cleared out.”

“At the end of the day, the ex-Lehman boys are in control,” says another. “Where there were overlaps, most of the redundancies came from the Nomura side.”

At the start of this month, credit veteran Raj Dhown left Nomura for an unspecified location. The bank has also recently lost a European executive director of sales trading to Troika Dialog,

Former Lehman staff, however, appear inclined to hang around – despite having cashed the last of their guarantees in October. One headhunter says may simply because they’re waiting for the hiring rush in the New Year.

“The biggest hirer this year was BarCap and they’d already cherry picked everyone they wanted from Lehman anyway. The other houses that were hiring – Citi, JP Morgan and RBS – have now stopped recruiting, but they’ll continue in 2010 and we’d expect to see Lehman people leaving Nomura around about then.”