The borrower's perspective; LBO financing: a changing landscape; Prudent expansion is the key; LTM European Holco PIK's – the next stage of the bull market

"We absolutely cannot talk about it," was the repeated response of Goldman Sachs to market reports that it is setting up a mini private exchange to enable alternative investment firms to list without the hassles of regulatory oversight.

Housing provision for a burgeoning youthful population puts the development of a mortgage market centre stage in the GCC countries.

In Euromoney’s February 2007 Islamic finance awards section, we incorrectly stated that the PCFC or Dubai Ports $3.5 billion pre-IPO convertible "was structured by Deutsche Bank". The transaction, Best Islamic finance deal of the year, was structured, arranged, underwritten and distributed by Barclays Capital and Dubai Islamic Bank only, while Deutsche Bank was advising PCFC on the acquisition of P&O. We regret any inconvenience that may have been caused.

It is often the informal parts of conferences that are the most revealing.

The European Commission’s Markets in Financial Instruments Directive is due for final implementation from November. Many participants in the foreign exchange market still seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that Mifid will not have any impact on them, because the EU’s prime intention is to protect retail equity investors. Furthermore, the FX market is relatively confident that it is already delivering excellent execution (see Does FX need best-execution regulations? Euromoney May 2006).

Euromoney’s borrower awards capture the most important names and trends seen across the globe during the past 12 months.

As the boundaries of corporate securitization are increasingly stretched, the foundations upon which the concept is built are rapidly being eroded.

LCDX success gives the green light for the growth of loan derivative products.

weeklyFiX's coverage of FXMS

180 – the percentage rise in the value of US real estate ECM deals in the year to date over the same period in 2006. The total raised so far this year is $19.5 billion, up from just $7 billion in the 2006 period. The proportion of money raised by real estate companies through convertibles has increased 20 times, and currently accounts for 58% of US real estate ECM volume, $11.3 billion, compared with just 8% in the same period in 2006.

Bear Stearns has hired a new head of sales for prime brokerage in Europe as part of the US bank’s renewed efforts to build a meaningful presence outside the US. The bank appointed James Shekerdemian, from Lehman Brothers, where he was previously head of the quantitative hedge funds sales group.

Increasing international competition for China listings, most notably between London’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM) and China’s domestic markets of Shanghai and Shenzhen, is squeezing market leader Hong Kong, say insiders.

Dividend swaps market soars as investors profit.

Broker dealers collaborate to sponsor Project Alpha.

Unknown risks – the black swans – could upset the Asian party.

The stake held by Refco in FXCM, a leading retail aggregator, has been put up for sale by the creditors of the bankrupt futures brokers. Initial bids have to be submitted by June 29. Refco’s creditors will then launch a second round for the highest bidders, ending July 29, with the final winner announced in August.

It was announced on May 25 that Jack Jeffery had resigned as chief executive of electronic broking at Icap. The broker understandably moved swiftly to replace him, announcing that John Nixon would take over the role. Jeffery had overseen EBS’s integration into Icap after it was bought out from its mainly bank-consortium owners in June 2006. Jeffery joined EBS from Citi in February 2002 and he is widely credited with maintaining and then advancing EBS’s position as the market’s pre-eminent spot platform.

lnvestors question value of ISE deal.

The chances of a single Gulf currency receded further in May after Kuwait decided to break away from its US dollar peg and fix against a currency basket instead. At the time of writing the make-up of the basket was not known.

Imminent competition between execution ventures is likely to mean more trading and therefore more money for everyone.

The real action in debt capital markets has moved off the public stage.

Commodity markets used to be dominated by producers and users hedging their production and consumption. Now the mass arrival of investors has profoundly transformed these relatively small and illiquid markets. Peter Koh reports.

Russia is equally capable of fatally deterring and irresistibly attracting investors, as two recent big bank IPOs showed.

After years on the second tier of economic performance, Germany is ready for a return to the big time.

In most normal markets, when enough investors acknowledge the existence of a bubble, it will burst, so why has China’s ‘A’ share market, arguably the world’s most obvious stock market bubble, not popped yet?

The Champions’ League football final between Liverpool and AC Milan failed to live up to expectations but that evening London’s capital markets journalists were treated to an unexpected match between Deutsche Bank and UBS. Deutsche had sent out save-the-date invitations over a month before for a press party on the terrace at swanky restaurant Coq d’Argent.

It’s not often that you’ll find the majority of Euromoney staff in the same room together, what with vital conferences, meetings and sports-betting events going on all around the world. But to find them all in a church is surely a first.

Never let it be said that Euromoney hacks won’t go that extra mile to ensure our readers enjoy the hottest stories from the world’s frontier markets.

Euromoney journalists are used to conversing on all manner of subjects related to financial matters but last month your reporter found himself engaged in a most surreal topic: lactation rooms at banks.

Despite a long-running battle between the government and the army over Turkey’s religious and political future, foreign investors continue to flood the country with capital. That means plenty of business for foreign and domestic investment banks, and for a new wave of small but ambitious boutiques. Lawrence White reports.

The Colombian government’s decision to impose further capital controls in order to hinder the peso’s rapid appreciation amounts to "bad policy-making", according to Walter Molano of BCP Securities. In a research note on May 25 Molano said: "Colombia is one of the few emerging market countries that is not taking advantage of the commodity boom. Instead of focusing on its vast natural resource base, Colombia is exploiting the special relationship it enjoys with the US to secure quotas and preferential tariffs for light manufacturers – particularly textiles and clothing." The new regulations extend yet further the compulsory deposit requirements for investors.

Brazil’s market-leading ethanol producer, Cosan, recently made a U-turn on strategy that says a lot about the overheated market for the chemical. The firm rushed out announcements that it would shift from an acquisitive strategy to one that emphasized organic growth, including upgrades of existing facilities and mechanization of the sugar harvest, as well as expansion in less-competitive geographical areas. It blamed prices that it said were "in the clouds" for the rethink. At a hastily convened press conference, managers said that the price of acquisitions in the sector had risen by 147% between April 2005 and January to April of this year, according to the firm’s own calculations.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez has responded with scorn to criticisms that his refusal to renew the licence of opposition TV channel RCTV amounts to a direct assault on freedom of speech. The popular channel, which Chávez accuses of having supported an attempted coup in 2002, stopped broadcasting on May 27, leaving the country bereft of many of its favourite soap operas and comedy shows, and also of any mainstream anti-Chávez television. Chávez described as "laughable" the passing of condemnatory motions by both the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington and the European Parliament. The president clearly fancies himself as something of a media mogul: Venezuela is to give Danny "Lethal Weapon" Glover $18 million for a film about the Haitian slave uprising.

UBS has hired loans syndication specialist Monica Macia from Citi to work as an executive director on the loans capital markets group. A spokesman for UBS said that the firm had no comment to make on speculation that the move suggests a change in emphasis for the bank.

Investors are concerned that while low yields on Latin American sovereign debt and increasing opportunities in the corporate sector are driving more and more investors towards corporate fixed income, Wall Street credit research can’t keep up.

Brazil, which is already a major player in the $30 billion global trade in carbon credits, aims to hold its first online carbon credit auction this year on the São Paulo BM&F commodities and futures exchange in an initiative geared towards attracting European buyers. "We hope to reach an accord with one particular company interested in selling its credits via auction in the second half of the year," says Guilherme Magalhães Fagundes, the BM&F’s head of special projects. With a lack of liquidity in the world carbon credit market, daily trading is still some years away, but the BM&F says it aims to make the auction possible on the basis of buyer or seller demand and widen carbon credit sales away from the current business-to-business format.

Tapping into the growing trend for green investing, in May CLSA Capital Partners launched Asia’s first dedicated water and waste management fund, Clean Water Asia.

Credit Suisse and Instinet, the agency broker owned by Nomura Holdings, announced in May that they had agreed to link up their proprietary "dark liquidity pools" in Japan to enable their respective international clients to trade more efficiently in Japanese securities by executing larger trades with minimal market impact.

After a recent correction, Vietnam’s equity market has bounced back and so has capital-raising for new funds. The latest to tap the markets are PXP Vietnam Asset Management and Mekong Capital. Both managers have successful track records investing in Vietnamese equities yet both are raising new funds to expand into new investment areas.

Market mechanisms, not inflexible penal taxation, are the way to deal with global warming. And market approaches also open profitable channels for investors.

The smart money is already betting that the credit cycle is turning.

"Algorithmic trading can be shit sometimes"

"Ours is a top-down, bottoms-up strategy"

Synapse Investment Management, which was founded in 2006 by Graeme Anderson and Mark Holman, has put itself firmly on the map with the recent hire of Rob Ford from Barclays Capital.

The latest chapter in the Great Game saga has been opened with a landmark agreement to build a gas pipeline linking Turkmenistan with Russia. The accord is widely seen as a blow to the interests of US and western Europe, which had hoped that Turkmen gas would be channelled through a western-backed trans-Caspian Sea pipeline that would bypass Russia.

UK venture capital firm Oxford Capital Partners and Qatar National Bank and its private banking subsidiary Ansbacher Group have teamed up to form Qatar Capital Partners (QCP), a venture capital business in the Gulf state.

Companies working on improving inadequate water supplies in Asia’s growing economies are the prime focus of Wessex’s water investment fund. Co-founder Tim Weir tells Helen Avery how the company analyses their likely profitability.

In late May, Fitch Ratings cautioned that the outlook for debt issuance from central and eastern Europe might not be quite as rosy as some bond originators would have us believe. Although acknowledging that macroeconomic fundamentals in the region are strong and that the global environment remains generally supportive, the London-based ratings agency warned that substantial external financing requirements in some states mean that they are relatively highly exposed to a potential abrupt tightening in global liquidity. "Sovereign credit ratings in emerging Europe have risen further over the past 12 months, with seven upgrades and no downgrades," says Ed Parker, head of Fitch’s emerging Europe sovereign group. "However, upward momentum may be running out of juice, with only three countries – Armenia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine – now on a positive outlook and two – Hungary and Latvia – on a negative outlook."

The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) has issued its first euro-denominated global benchmark bond in a move that signals the borrower’s objective of increasing its profile. Its annual dollar benchmark operation had grown a bit stale. "We went on a non-deal roadshow throughout Asia, the Middle East and Europe," explains Doris Herrera-Pol, head of capital markets operations in the World Bank treasury. "We heard from investors that they were really interested in this issue."

Gary Cottle has left Morgan Stanley less than a year after joining the US investment bank. He joins Royal Bank of Scotland as head of corporate risk solutions for the UK and Europe.

Asset managers are part of an unusual issuer mix.

The International Swaps and Derivatives Association and a group of financial lawyers sponsored by the Federal Reserve (the Financial Markets Lawyers Group) have backed a Bear Stearns’ court appeal. In February this year, Bear Stearns was deemed liable for $125 million that fraudulent hedge fund the Manhattan Investment Fund, had deposited in the prime brokerage account it held at the investment bank before it filed for bankruptcy. The bankruptcy court concluded that Bear Stearns was liable for the deposits as their "initial transferee".

Standard & Poor’s has raised the long-term counterparty credit ratings for two of Citadel’s funds from Triple B to BBB+. "The funds’ performance in 2006 was strong and at the top of their peer group based on strong contributions across nearly all of the firm’s nine business units," said S&P’s report. "In 2006, Citadel Group reaped the rewards of years of restructuring and investments but also strongly benefited from its acquisition of the energy business of failed hedge fund Amaranth Advisors. Last year saw a significant increase in returns compared with 2004 and 2005, accompanied by an increase of the volatility of returns as measured by the standard deviation of monthly returns, but at all times well within the prescribed risk limits of the funds. The funds have never had an unprofitable year."

Hennessee’s 13th annual hedge fund manager survey reveals that managers are still shorting despite concerns that uptrending markets were shifting funds to long-only strategies. Hedge funds surveyed had a net exposure of +47%. Average gross exposure was 171%, the highest since the survey in 1995, indicating that more leverage is being used to generate returns. Charles Gradante of the Hennessee Group commented: "Despite the increase in assets and leverage throughout the industry, net exposures continue to remain fairly constant, indicating funds are finding a reasonable amount of short positions. However, we are seeing increased use of derivatives such as credit default swaps and ETFs, which we feel will become more common as the ability to borrow stocks and bonds declines.

Institutional investors might reduce private equity investments because of the growing number of club deals.

TAM, Brazil’s leading low-cost airline, is seeking to maintain and improve its position with funding such as its recent 10-year bond. CFO Libano Mirando Barroso talks to Chloe Hayward about the bond and the airline’s business strategy.

Russia’s Agency for Housing and Mortgage Lending priced the first domestic public MBS transaction last month via Citi. The financial institution placed Rb2.9 billion ($112 million) of class A bonds on Micex, the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange. The transaction will act as a benchmark for future Russian domestic MBS issuance. About 20 investors were attracted to the bonds.

Lehman Brothers has made Roger Nagioff global head of fixed income. He replaces Michael Gelbank, who has left the firm. The move came as a surprise not just because Nagioff has an equities background but also because the role will be based in London.

Interest-rate-related MTN supply has fallen.