Awards dinner photos are available here.

"Why not just give us one piece of paper saying banks can’t trade fixed income derivatives on a non-clearable basis?"

We at Euromoney would never claim credit for Romania’s dramatic 25 year shift from the deepest, darkest communism of the Ceausescu era to today’s EU membership and its knocking at the euro’s door, but we’ve been fascinated to learn we’ve had a modest role in its economic transformation.

In Euromoney’s December 2014 issue, we described in detail how Bank Asya had become a political football in Turkey. Politics and banking now seem to have combined to create a row in Turkey’s football community as well.

Brazilian bank Bradesco opens its London office on February 9. A small delegation of senior bankers from the bank’s Brazilian headquarters will fly over to mark the occasion.

The news that Abu Dhabi’s International Petroleum Investment Company has secured naming rights to Real Madrid’s home ground – turning it into the Abu Dhabi Santiago Bernabeu – represents an interesting branding exercise. Sovereign wealth funds rarely seek brand recognition: usually quite the reverse.

“If you take into account the deals that people took a run at but didn’t get over the line there has been a staggering increase in activity”

“When these large global banks report their risk-weighted capital ratios, their creditworthiness is flattered because of their assessment of risks in the asset base. This is a fools-errand; it’s like asking a school-kid what grade they deserve”

Did you get a private island for Christmas? No? Poor you. It’s the latest trend. According to Alan O’Connor, director of the Debutesq Group, there has been a surge in enquiries for private islands recently “in particular from wealthy eastern Europeans and resort operators from Asia”.

Dwindling stocks of Yorkshire tea in Euromoney’s São Paulo office prompted an internet search that turned up Britsuperstore.com – a website that sends British consumables to far-flung nationals desperate to keep on eating or drinking a little taste of England.

As Christmas approached, a leaked internal memo from RBS’s managing director of branch and private banking, Jane Howard, revealed just how far the UK state-owned bank was prepared to take the season of goodwill.

1 – the value in trillions of euros the European Central Bank is planning to expand its balance sheet by to try and revive the flagging eurozone economy.

“This isn’t the end. It is the beginning. There are many more stress tests yet to come”

“We’d rather you use the word ‘innovative’ rather than ‘aggressive’”

Euromoney is on a health kick. Stand outside our UK building near St Paul’s Cathedral, and you’re as likely to see one of our team drawing on an e-cigarette as you are someone with a traditional ‘fag’ these days.

When an email dropped into our inbox from BNP Paribas talking about something called the Marylebone Project we were hoping it might be the name of a five-piece band with BNPP’s head of primary markets, Martin Egan, as its lead.

Is the eagerness of bank executives to spend heavily on retraining bankers to change their culture achieving anything?

No, this headline does not refer to those naughty traders who abused the London fix in the foreign exchange market and caused a number of banks to receive huge fines.

“Why wouldn’t I buy market share when it is so cheap?”

“Phones 4U serves as a timely reminder that even in low default environments, fundamentals do matter”

Big bankers saying absolutely nothing at all with utter conviction often take centre stage in the theatre of financial politics that is the IMF annual meeting. Most financiers, therefore, tend to snub the official proceedings in favour of meeting clients.

Talking about the paranormal might get you some interesting looks in your next meeting at a bank. But in tech, talk of angels and unicorns is par for the course.

Private equity professionals have always prided themselves on their business acumen. It takes real smarts to buy an underperforming company and turn it around (or, ahem, just flip it in a rising market).

Catching lightning in a bottle

“They were valuing (the assets) using discounted cash flow, which gives a different value about, let’s say, 10 times the actual value of the market price. He wanted me to write a paper saying that not only was this possible but that it was appropriate”

“Do not make any moves. You have been spotted”The slightly alarming message that popped up onto a blank screen when one of our correspondents tried to log in the press centre website of the Ukrainian Ministry of Economy & Trade

Word reaches us from Seoul of a fabulous new career direction for Macquarie’s Korea head, John Walker.

Most things that world footballer of the year Cristiano Ronaldo frequently touches – especially footballs, and in his own mind at least his slick-gelled hair – turn out perfectly.

You couldn’t make it up. Yet investigators across the world are trying to determine if making it up is exactly what Banco Espírito Santo’s Ricardo Salgado did in Lisbon. Lausanne corporate advisor Eurofin has found itself uncomfortably inside the maelstrom.

At $25 billion, Alibaba’s IPO, completed last month, is the biggest in history. Its first day pop of 36.3% was the biggest ever for any IPO of over $10 billion.