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Premier Foods seeking approval for rights issue and placement.

Investors who supported those bank capital raisings may be regretting it already.

GLG Partners has taken on Kaveh Sheibani and Julian Harvey, two of the founders of London-based event-driven fund Pendragon. GLG will become the investment manager of the funds and accounts at Pendragon Capital.

Latin American sovereigns are on track to meet their 2009 financing needs after an impressive start to the year, according to senior debt bankers. Barclays Capital reckons that 34% of this year’s estimated total of $19 billion of emerging market sovereign issuance has already been successfully placed despite fears that the US and Europe would crowd them out. Latin American corporates, in contrast, are facing more difficult and expensive financing.

Russian fund group Da Vinci Capital Management has launched the marketing campaign for its latest investment vehicle. The CIS Private Sector Value Fund (PSVF) is designed to offer investors the chance to profit from the opportunities available in private equity in Russia and other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

With US president Barack Obama taking power last month, there were hopes that US-Venezuela relations would improve. Obama initially announced plans to talk to president Hugo Chávez but has since been reported as saying that Chávez exports terrorism, supports the Farc insurgents in Colombia and has obstructed progress in Latin America. "There is still time" for Obama to correct his views, Chávez says. He adds: "No one can say that I threw the first stone at Obama. He threw it at me." He concludes that Obama has the "same stench" as his predecessor, George W Bush.

Bill Schwab has been appointed global head of real estate at the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (Adia). Schwab joins from JPMorgan, where he was managing director of European real estate finance.

VTB, Russia’s second-biggest bank, announced worse-than-expected results for the third quarter after making a loss of $369 million following the doubling of its provisioning levels. Analysts at Nomura reckon that the biggest challenge facing VTB is that the equity capital of the bank declined by $1.5 billion in the third quarter alone. The bank’s chief financial officer has said that it needs to raise tier 1 capital and is hopeful that its minority shareholders will come to the rescue. In the third quarter, the bank’s capital adequacy ratio fell to 14% from 15.8%, although it’s still well above the Russian minimum level of 10%. The bank’s tier 1 ratio dropped to 12.7% from 14.4% in the second quarter.

A research report by Gulf Finance House raises the possibility of Kuwait going back to a dollar peg because of extreme volatility in the FX markets and to unfreeze its money markets. "Based on conversations with treasurers, the presence of FX risk premium is effectively imposing a barrier against the flow of funds from cheaper sources in the GCC to Kuwaiti banks," says the report. "Accordingly, dinar interbank rates remain the highest in the region, even after the recent moves of the Central Bank of Kuwait to activate repo facilities of 1% overnight and 3% one-month." Kuwait adopted a basket peg in May 2007 to contain inflationary pressures. The other GCC countries have their currencies pegged to the dollar.

Foreign exchange prime brokers and their exchange-traded product counterparts, the full commission merchants (FCMs), will be fully aware of the complexities involved in modern risk management. To an extent, the uptake of electronic trading has made their task far easier – there are clear audit trails, and trade confirmations are, in most cases, sent out in almost real time.

Where there is market turmoil, you can bet your bottom dollar there will be a lawsuit. And indeed, more than betting, these days investors are handing over money on a long-term basis to fund managers who will pick out lawsuits that are likely to pay out.

Argentina’s restructuring veteran says debt default plans are unrealistic