May 2005

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Only for the Brave Private banks are smart, nimble, well managed; state-owned banks are slow, cumbersome and find it hard to make money. That conventional wisdom is being overturned in Russia, in the short term at least. After years of ...

Stars of the New Russia Russia Awards Best Banks Best Domestic Bank MDM Bank Best Overseas Bank RZB/Raiffeisenbank Best Investment Bank value Best Commercial Bank Vneshtorgbank (VTB) Best Consumer Finance House Russian Standard Best Forex Bank Alfa Bank Best Trade ...

The stakes are high, and so are the risks. So why are multinationals still buying into the Russia story? Project financing consists of financing assets on a long-term basis and, as such, is similar to long-term lending. Repayment of the ...

Treasury & Cash Management: We brought together some of the industry’s leading players to discuss recent developments in the cash management industry. Global Finance: How will corporate treasuries interact with banks in the future? How will this be affected by ...

DR NEWS Patrick Colle Companies from South Korea, India, China and Taiwan will make Asia the main source of capital raising using depositary receipts in 2005, says Patrick Colle, global head of ADRs at JPMorgan. Asian issuers will account for ...

India Indian Airlines: Ready for takeoff India’s reforms continue apace with the government’s decision to privatize aviation fuel supply to airports, ending a monopoly by state-owned refiners. The government will buy all the fuel dumps and hydrants from the state-owned ...

China Detained: China Construction Bank’s Zhang Enzhao In April anti-Japanese protests in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou further strained the perennially tense China-Japan relationship after Japan approved textbooks that critics claim play down Japan’s wartime brutality. Tensions further intensified when the ...

Brazil Brazilian finance minister Antonio Palocci President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva’s approval rating has dropped by six points since February of this year. Conducted by the Sensus polling firm and released by the National Transport Confederation late last month, ...

Russia Survivor: Russia’s privatization supremo, Anatoly Chubais In late March President Vladimir Putin extended an olive branch to the country’s oligarchs by proposing legal reforms that would in effect put shady privatizations of the 1990s beyond the reach of the ...

NEWS Jonathan Wilmot Global economic growth typically decelerates at this point in the production cycle, but there is no evidence of a slowdown to date, says Jonathan Wilmot, chief global strategist at Credit Suisse First Boston. Meanwhile, CSFB’s index of ...

Unitd States Richard Fuld, Lehman’s CEO Why are investment banks buying into hedge funds? To paraphrase bank robber Willie Sutton, “Because that’s where the money is”. Lehman Brothers last month paid an undisclosed sum for a 20% stake in Ospraie, ...

CIS London-bound: The city’s appeal is growing Russian and other CIS-based companies overwhelmingly select the London Stock Exchange as the favorite foreign destination for raising equity capital, according to a study by Ernst & Young. The LSE and its growth ...

Foreign Exchange Judging by all the recent attention given to the J-curve by economists and analysts, the outlookcould get worse for the dollar before it gets better. The dollar has been rising in recent weeks in anticipation of higher US ...

Global Equity/DRs On July 1, 2005, the European Union will implement the Prospectus Directive, a cornerstone in the creation of a single pan-European capital market. The new legal framework, which applies to both EU and non-EU issuers, will introduce a ...

Focus: Corporate Debt Analysts say it’s not a question of if, but when the bonds of General Motors and Ford Motor will slide below investment grade, probably late this year. The once triple-A-rated US automakers are flirting with high-yield status, ...

Mergers & Acquisitions A listing of the members of the investor group that agreed to acquire SunGard Data Systems in an $11 billion leveraged buyout in late March reads like a Who’s Who of private equity. Silver Lake Partners, a ...

Miner on the Move John Snow: Laying down the law Soaring minerals prices helped boost revenues at Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, or CVRD, by 53%, to $8.5 billion in 2004. Rio de Janeiro-based CVRD, the world’s biggest producer of ...

Belgium Didier Reynders: Aiming to trim deficit Belgium has discovered a new asset class for securitization: the government’s uncollected tax debt. Finance minister Didier Reynders says it is feasible for Belgium to offer the country’s difficult-to-collect tax receivables as an ...