Growing interest from Chilean institutions; Prospects more attractive than in Brazil

Miners mull expansion capital transactions; Key oil company considers equity issue

Varvel becomes CEO as Calello steps up to chairman; Kyriakos-Saad and Quintella get bigger regional roles.

Dubai’s debt troubles show no sign of easing, with some investors believing that a restructuring of Dubai Holding, a private investment company for Sheikh Mohammed, is inevitable.

Spanish bank buys BofA’s minority stake; Valuation now $10 billion

Aim is to cut number of underwriters; Follow-ons outweigh new issues

Poland’s ambitious privatization programme shows no sign of being derailed by the European debt crisis and global equity market woes, with recent share sales continuing to attract overwhelming demand.

UBS has reorganized its Asia-Pacific equities team following the departure of Steve Barg, head of global capital markets (GCM) Asia, to Goldman Sachs. Barg is credited within the bank for overseeing its continued dominance of Asia’s IPO market during the second half of this decade alongside China deal machine Henry Cai, and his departure was a big loss for the firm. It followed the exit of the bank’s equity head, Mark Williams, on May 6 to Nomura. Having lost two of the three key men (Cai being the third) in its Asia business, UBS immediately faced comments from media and competitors that the equity team, the most successful among its peers this decade in what has been Asia’s most profitable core investment banking business, was collapsing.

The demise of the Prudential deal together with inhospitable debt and equity markets implies that the second-quarter numbers for global investment banks will be bad.

“Nomura was in a strategic corner: they were trapped in Japan. They bought the Lehman operations for virtually nothing. If I criticize the Japanese for anything – it is that they are not involved enough in the investment banking business."

Vikram Pandit has taken Citi from a place where the institution was written off as a basket case to being a share beloved by star hedge fund managers and widely seen as a buy for widows’ and orphans’ pension pots.

Limited understanding of markets by key regulatory and political figures is a contributing factor to the European sovereign debt crisis, as financiers and government officers increasingly fail to communicate.

Ultimately, the deficit must be repaid. But changing demographics and larger savings pools suggest relatively high levels of government indebtedness might be sustainable in the short and medium term. The bigger risk is that austerity plunges a credit-constrained world into a nasty double-dip recession.

Markets have focused on the woes of the peripheral eurozone member states and their sovereign debt crisis but we should remember that public finances in the UK, the US and Japan are in an equally bad, if not worse, state.

The reluctant decision by European governments to publish stress tests for their domestic banks might shed an unwelcome light on the illiquidity of many local sovereign debt markets.