| New-borrower profile - A strange beast from Berlin. Only two things stand out when you enter Berlin's once-charming Alexanderplatz, made horrific by the Communists and now being rebuilt: the first is an imposing golf-tee-shaped television transmitter, ever the symbol of Big Brother, the second is the slightly less imposing logo of Bankgesellschaft Berlin (BGB), whose large entwined lines of red, blue and yellow plastic rotate on the rooftop of one of the two buildings it has bought in the square. Literally meaning "banking company of Berlin", the newest entrant to the Euromarkets is Germany's sixth-largest banking group. It was consolidated in 1994 in a structure that even those who work for it call a "strange beast". Yet it can lay claim to being a universal bank. "The only thing that differentiates us from Deutsche Bank is that we have a unique shareholder structure," says a Bankgesellschaft Berlin staff member. It certainly does, and that is what makes it an intriguing prospect for the Euromarkets, especially since it has just set up a Euro medium-term note (EMTN) programme that indicates it will borrow $5 billion, beginning with a Deutschmark benchmark in June at the earliest. |