January 2001
| Euromoney January 2001 The secretive partnership of Lazard is not accustomed to public scrutiny, let alone attack from outside. But in early 2000, French entrepreneur Vincent Bolloré announced that he had acquired 31% of one company in the complex Lazard ownership chain. When Swiss bank UBS revealed that it too had acquired shares in other companies in the chain, Lazard chairman Michel David-Weill rushed to fortify the defences against the threat to his family bank's independence,which he cherishes above all else. In November 2000, David-Weill announced that Bolloré had gone away, having achieved what looked like a successful greenmail operation. But he is not the only threat to David-Weill's command. While battling his outside assailants in public, David-Weill has faced a less visible but more serious challenge from rebels inside the Lazard ranks. They have wrung significant concessions out of this last of the banking aristocrats. Now, if an independent Lazard is to thrive, it must stem the tide of departures and rebuild morale within. - The autocratic aristocrat who divides to rule
External and internal pressures are making Lazard chairman Michel David-Weill's position precarious. But he will leave only with the greatest reluctance.
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Euromoney January 2001
November 24 2000 was a sad day for Liffe traders. Not because they lost vast sums of money, but because that was the day the trading pits finally closed, leaving those soft commodities traders who were the last to depart facing an uncertain future. Few lifestyles offer the same stress, tension and noise as derivatives or commodities trading. In an article that first appeared at www.euromoney.com, Jules Evans discovers the highs and the lows of life in the pit, and finds out how former traders survive in the real world
Euromoney January 2001
Vladimir Putin has quickly crushed Russia's infamous oligarchs who once thrived under Boris Yeltsin, though the Family still holds some influence in Moscow. Alongside it, two new factions now share the ascendancy in the Kremlin. Sergei Ivanov leads the hardliners that Putin is using to tighten his grip on political power. German Gref leads the liberal economists charting Russia's economic reform. A clash between them may be coming.
Euromoney January 2001
Each month since last August, Vladimir Putin’s government
has attempted to put in place a new aspect of economic reform. But some problems, notably the banking sector and the entrenched Soviet-style bureaucracy, are particularly intractable.
Euromoney January 2001
Euromoney January 2001
Russia’s banks, compared with those in other developing economies, are making a meagre contribution to economic growth. The big corporations, such as Lukoil, have their own banks, and banking institutions in which the state has a stake are beginning to dominate the rest of the sector. Most of the commercial banks are puny, the survivors mostly being those that were too small to wreck themselves in the GKO market crash. That means they have been able to do little by way of lending to smaller businesses.
Euromoney January 2001
State-owned Sberbank, the former People’s Savings Bank, accounts for a quarter of Russia’s bank assets and half of deposits. Along with other banks in which the state has a stake, it is beginning to dominate the sector. Ben Aris spoke to Andrei Kazmin, the chairman of Sberbank’s board, who claims that the state connection does not give his bank an unfair advantage
Euromoney January 2001
Russia’s post-Soviet oil industry was restructured by robber barons who showed a scant regard for minority shareholders and ran their businesses on a shoestring, salting away funds abroad. Now, though, a harder government line and, above all, high oil prices, have encouraged modernization and a desire to please foreign investors
Euromoney January 2001
Stephen Jennnings, CEO at Renaissance Capital, looks at consolidation in Russian industry.
Euromoney January 2001
Russia’s three biggest monopolies – the companies that control gas and electricity production and supply, and the railways – need heavy investment and reorganization. President Putin is trying to push through change but he is dealing with “states within the state”.
Euromoney January 2001
The most dynamic of Russia’s companies are relatively small compared with the energy and utility behemoths. Typically manufacturing consumer goods with a rapid payback from investment, they have been able, so far, to grow using their own resources.
Euromoney January 2001
When the first generation of online firms appeared in the US equity market, they loudly broadcast their ambitions to take on the established players in distribution and new issues. Some made a brief impression, a few managed to get themselves acquired by their larger rivals, many failed. The big firms rolled on. The latest group of internet start-ups have learned a lesson: don’t compete directly with the big equity firms, do something they don’t do.
Euromoney January 2001
Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic offer three different puzzles for western European banks. While the fall of the iron curtain presented new opportunities in new markets, the transition from communist regimes to free market economies is still proving a painful struggle.
Euromoney January 2001
Euromoney January 2001
Euromoney January 2001
Euromoney January 2001
At the end of last year, a new stock exchange was unveiled in Vienna – the New Europe Exchange. It typifies the Austrian financial markets: it’s a joint venture with a German partner aimed at trading equities of central and eastern European companies. Austrian banks have long known they cannot survive on the meagre profits at home. Increasingly their search for new business will lead them beyond even near neighbours.
Euromoney January 2001
Euromoney January 2001
With the oil price high and large new oil finds in the Caspian Sea, Kazakhstan has attracted plenty of interest from foreign investors. But tensions have grown up between foreign multinationals and the Kazakhstan government over previously agreed deals. The government feels it has been overly generous in the past, raising fears among foreign investors that old contracts will be redrafted. The president has convened a special council to discuss these issues.
Euromoney January 2001
Much as some might like to, banks can’t uninvent the internet. Nor is there any clear sign that they know what to do with it. For a variety of motives, both obvious and obscure, they have begun entering into platform consortia with rivals. That’s problem enough and costly. Worse, though, is when a platform seems to be biting the hands that feed it.
Euromoney January 2001
Euromoney January 2001
Turning money and small-value payments into digital form doesn’t interest the banks – it’s against their interests and too expensive. Into the vacuum have stepped hundreds of payment schemes, many of them claiming they have found the Holy Grail. These boasts are premature. Some ideas are elegant but don’t have critical mass. Worse still, they rely on those indifferent beasts, the banks. Find your way through the Darwinian jungle with the help of David Shirreff
Euromoney January 2001
Although the internet is not tearing up the rule-book in cash management, it is subtly altering the banks’ business models, both changing the way banks provide these services and creating a new class of customers. By Chris Cockerill.
Euromoney January 2001
Deutsche Bank tops our annual poll of polls – by a wide margin – after a consistently impressive run of survey results in 2000, most notably in foreign exchange, where Citigroup was dethroned for the first time in 21 years. Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and Citigroup head the rankings for a new category, market rating, which brings together overall returns on equity, assets and employees. The market rating and poll of polls have been combined to produce an implied competitiveness rating, in which Deutsche again pips eight American rivals to top position. But a mediocre score for market rating and mergers elsewhere suggest that the German bank might not have it so easy in 2001.
Euromoney January 2001
Emerging market governments were forced to bail out collapsing banking systems at huge public cost following the economic and financial crises of the 1990s and 1980s. Many are now considering setting up deposit insurance systems to bring more transparency and stability to implicit sovereign guarantees for banks. Oddly, in the US, where deposit insurance was first established and whose model emerging markets are often encouraged to follow, deposit insurance is being reconsidered. On its own, it’s no safeguard against banking crises.
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Euromoney January 2001
Issuer: British TelecommunicationsAmount: $10 billionType of issue: global bondDate of issue: December 5, 2000Bookrunners: Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Schroder SSB
Euromoney January 2001
The Financial Services Authority will set up a new market abuse regime next year, but withthe proposals on the table, City lawyers doubt that it will make their lives, and those of their clients, any easier.
Euromoney January 2001
CEO, buyingpower
Euromoney January 2001
Head of asset-backed finance, Bear Stearns International
