The panel for the second session at Standard Chartered’s China and Africa forum had already faced some tough questions on poverty and corruption, so they must have been uneasy when the Standard Chartered banker who popped up at the last minute took an even tougher line.

In an interesting reversal, Robert Palache is to join Morgan Stanley, the firm from which he poached a high-profile three-man CMBS team in 2003. At the time Palache was head of real estate, corporate securitization and infrastructure finance at Barclays Capital, and hired Lynn Gilbert, Christian Janssen and Natalie Howard from Morgan Stanley’s CMBS team to build up its CMBS Conduit, Eclipse. Now Palache, who walked out of BarCap in March this year, joins Morgan and reports to John Hyman and Ellen Brunsberg, the woman from whom he poached Gilbert and team in 2003. In his new role, Palache will focus on further developing the bank’s securitization origination business in Europe in areas such as infrastructure, whole business and new asset securitizations.

Bradford & Bingley’s treasurer, Peter Green, and head of capital markets and securitization, Mark Winter, want to regain ownership from investment banks of their institution’s dialogue with investors. They are following a simple strategy of diversifying the investor base. Allied to a remarkable level of transparency during the printing of new issues, this is already reaping its rewards. Alex Chambers reports.

Euromoney Awards for excellence 2006

The merger of Caisse d’Epargne’s and Banque Populaire’s investment banks and asset managers opens up the possibility of even more consolidation in France.

Morgan Stanley has hired Gary Cottle as head of corporates in its European global capital markets business. He will be responsible for corporate debt and derivatives, enterprise risk management, liability management and transaction management. Cottle resigned in mid-March from Barclays Capital, where he was head of corporate risk advisory for the EMEA region. During his time at BarCap, Cottle built a well-regarded corporate and sovereign derivative franchise.

But could publicly listed private equity funds stymie their development?

All the fundamentals are in place for rapid expansion of the Mexican MBS market. When financing structures are fine-tuned, foreign investors should move in to boost growth. Felix Salmon reports.

South Africa’s securitization market has developed so rapidly that it has today reached a level of sophistication that the US and Europe took more than 20 years to achieve, according to consultancy firm Deloitte. And the emergence of bank balance-sheet transactions is set to keep bankers busy in coming months.

Standard & Poor’s new evaluated pricing service joins an increasingly crowded field in the race to improve price transparency in European ABS.

The World Cup stoked football fever and passion among fans all over the world but cool-headed investors have been totally unmoved.

Jürgen Stark has taken Otmar Issing’s seat but Issing’s old role has been split, reinforcing collegiality on the board.

All banks have to deal with non-performing loans (NPLs) and delinquent debtors. In Indonesia, a market with weak bankruptcy laws, rampant corruption and family-controlled corporations, the problem is serious.

Barclays Capital has expanded its electronic trading platform to offer secondary market liquidity in all the bank’s equity structured note offerings.

Are the much-hyped credit derivative product companies now lining up to launch relying on an arbitrage that is dangerously close to disappearing?

The European Investment Bank has launched a new bond targeted at retail investors that can be sold in all 12 countries in the eurozone. Called eurozone public offering of securities (Epos) the security uses the passporting mechanism that the EU’s prospectus directive introduced last June. The €1 billion 10-year bond is lead managed by Merrill Lynch with a 12-strong syndicate of retail banks – one for each eurozone country. The deal is listed in Luxembourg. It is a lightly structured transaction, offering 5% in the first year and then a multiple of the HICP measure of inflation.

The refinancing of the Grupo Ferrovial takeover of BAA will be a showcase for infrastructure securitization, the first of a number of high-profile deals expected this year.

Asia’s private banking ranks continue to swell as a benign market lures in more entrants. Costs are escalating and so is product pricing. Market growth may yet hide banks’ hubris but any reversal in trends could leave some dangerously exposed. Chris Leahy reports.

Little-known London-based Cheviot Asset Management has poached 50 investment management professionals from UBS and other leading investment firms as it relaunches itself as an independent private client asset management group.

The equity market’s violent reaction to seemingly innocuous data has puzzled many commentators. At first bond investors reacted much more calmly to inflation fears but subsequently they seem to have been infected by the equity investors’ pessimism.

Key structural alterations have been made to UBS’s fixed-income business that involve the vertical integration of sales and trading in four product areas: investment-grade credit, MBS/ABS, European government/Libor derivatives, and US Libor flow derivatives.

The US investment bank’s move points to a greater focus on the FIG hybrid capital sphere from its DCM coverage teams.

One of the more successful hedge funds in Latin America, Copernico Capital Partners, is sitting on the sidelines as the market volatility continues, having presciently disbursed most of its Argentine holdings back to investors in April.

The recent popularity of bank balance sheet CLOs, ushered in by ABN Amro, HSBC and Barclays Capital at the end of last year, shows no sign of abating. In June alone, RBS, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Commerzbank, Standard Chartered and Sampo were all in the market with deals. These are straightforward balance sheet and regulatory capital management exercises in the run-up to Basle II and as such tend to be large, one-off exercises. Both synthetic, RBS’s Arran Corporate Loans CLO is £3.5 billion equivalent and Deutsche’s London Wall 2006 deal is €3 billion. BNP Paribas’s Global Liberté V is predominantly backed by lending in the US and Canada and is $12 billion while Commerzbank’s CoCo Finance 2006 is a €4.5 billion trade. Standard Chartered’s latest balance sheet CLO references $1.6 billion of loans, and Sampo’s €1 billion Sea Fort Securities is the first CLO from a Finnish bank.

Less liquidity in equity markets suggests that investment strategies harnessing volatility are appropriate.

Euromoney congratulates those that have won this year, and challenges those that came close to make our decisions even harder in 2007.

The recent sale of the first Islamic compliant securitization originated in the US is likely to open up a new source for the sukuk market, bankers believe.