When Malcolm Glazer bought UK Premiership football club Manchester United in May, alarm bells rang. The £790.3 million ($1.4 billion) deal was partly funded by a high-cost loan of £275 million from three US hedge funds, and subject to strict ebitda targets over the first two years.

Dresdner Bank has sent out a request for proposals for a sale and leaseback of its retail banking network in Germany. The deal involves some 300 banks and will raise an estimated €2 billion. In mid-December four buyers were left in the auction process – Babcock and Brown, Carlyle, Citigroup Property Investment and Fortress.

JPMorgan found itself in a sticky hole last month when its private equity arm, JPMorgan Partners, was part of a consortium bidding for US doughnut company Dunkin’ Brands, which was being sold by French drinks company Pernod Ricard.

The Tokyo Stock Exchange found that a malfunction in its new and trouble-prone trading system prevented Mizuho Securities from being able to cancel the mistaken J-Com order.

Loss of guidance note 5 wording boosts shareholder leverage.

In battle for Time Warner, he must convince institutions and the proxy recommendation service advisers.

Has Gartmore’s public mulling of the possibility of an IPO in the past few months been nothing more than an attempt to attract takeover bids? Statements from the fund manager now pour cold water on the notion of an IPO but concede that the firm is open to acquisition enquiries. The latest buyer to be mentioned in the rumours is Lehman Brothers.

With just weeks to go before the SEC’s new hedge fund regulation comes into force, its legitimacy has been questioned by a federal appeals court. Philip Goldstein has been challenging the rule in court, arguing that the regulator does not have the power to alter or make law [see Euromoney March 2005]. Although it was widely supposed that Goldstein’s complaints would go unnoticed, judges in the case last month questioned whether the SEC had overstepped its authority. A decision is expected in two months.

Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and RBS finance the UK pub party.

A new series of private banking indices is to be launched this month, replacing those ABN Amro established in May.

Market dismisses concentration risk claims.

Just as Schroders Investment Management joins the ranks of company pension funds to dramatically cut equity exposure, the debate about the merits of such moves is heating up.

The departure of BNP Paribas’ head of corporate debt capital markets, Brian Lazell, was a real shock. It is highly unusual for bankers to leave their jobs just weeks before bonuses are paid. But it is clear from insiders that Lazell has another job that he is due to take up early in the New Year.

A trader at Mizuho Securities in Tokyo accidentally sold 610,000 shares in J-Com for ¥1 instead of one share for ¥610,000.

Tier 1 perpetual CMS-linked products, once in high demand from private investors, have shown their dark side. Some deals have lost 20% of their value. Their highly illiquid nature means investors could be left high and dry. How did these inappropriate products come to be sold to an unsuitable investor base? Alex Chambers and Helen Avery report.

Thailand faces a looming pensions crisis. Its government is already moving down the path of reform but its critics don’t like the direction in which the programme is headed. Chris Leahy reports from Bangkok.

Asia’s business community is never slow to spot a trend and real estate investment trusts are certainly hot news. A trickle from the pipeline of early Reit offerings in Singapore and latterly Hong Kong earlier in 2005 threatens to become a torrent of new issues in 2006 as the region’s property developers and investment banks line up to launch new vehicles for Asia’s yield-voracious investors.

With the Bombay Sensex, India’s benchmark index, hitting new highs, it is perhaps not surprising that December saw India’s second largest ever equity deal and one of the biggest deals in Asia in 2005. Leading private sector bank ICICI Bank raised more than $1.5 billion from a local and American depositary share offering through Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley.

The Czech Republic’s PPF Group, which owns Home Credit and insurer Ceska Pojistovna, has managed to achieve top three positions in all of its countries of operation and with limited need for international financing. Now, the previously inwardly focused group has finally begun to let outsiders in. Kathryn Wells reports.

Fitch has cut Hungary’s sovereign credit rating to BBB+ from A–, one of the first times that a new EU member state has had a downward, rather than upward, rating movement applied to it since the EU enlargement process began.

Analysts are pondering the new economy minister’s strategy.

A recent report by BreakingViews has revived the familiar story that EBS is up for sale, claiming that the company was hawking itself around via its adviser, Citigroup. The £1 billion ($1.8 billion) valuation that BreakingViews has put on EBS looks a little toppy and might well scare potential suitors away. Back-of-the-fag-packet calculations suggest that EBS captures about 20% of the total spot market. As FX volumes are still expected to grow, and EBS could quite conceivably increase its market share, someone with deep pockets might well decide it is worth a punt, even at £1 billion. However, whether its multiple owners will ever agree on the attractions of a suitor remains to be seen.

Africa:

Everyone seems to be making the decision to seek alpha in foreign exchange, but what does that entail? Leading figures in the FX market debate how to combine systematic and discretionary risk allocation, the importance of choosing the right managers, understanding volatility and whether or not the sell side has helped the transition to alpha.

Last year was tumultuous for Ecuador. A president was ousted, a spat with the World Bank threatened to get out of hand and there were genuine fears that the sovereign might default. At long last, though, there are signs that Ecuador might be on the path to recovery, not least because of the strong support that the sovereign received for its first bond issue in six years.

Excitement over corporate hybrids has been replaced by hopes of a boom in M&A refinancing.

Weak execution caused by the end-of-year rush to issue was mostly limited to the CMBS sector. Execution lower down the capital structure suffered the most, with triple B notes hitting three-month Euribor plus 100 basis points, a level not seen for more than 18 months.

Greece’s economy grew faster than expected in 2005. But its government faces a major challenge in 2006: to maintain its strong growth rate while complying with the EU directive to cut its budget deficit by the end of the year. By Dimitris Kontogiannis.

Management consultants are as famed for their work ethic as for their innovative ideas. But the strain of working long hours and spending long periods away from home at clients’ offices takes its toll. Consulting firms lose anything between 15% and 40% of their consultants every year.

As economic growth slows in 2006, more businesses are expected to fail, with the biggest increases likely in Germany, Japan, the UK, and the US.