Euromoney journalists are used to conversing on all manner of subjects related to financial matters but last month your reporter found himself engaged in a most surreal topic: lactation rooms at banks.

The latest chapter in the Great Game saga has been opened with a landmark agreement to build a gas pipeline linking Turkmenistan with Russia. The accord is widely seen as a blow to the interests of US and western Europe, which had hoped that Turkmen gas would be channelled through a western-backed trans-Caspian Sea pipeline that would bypass Russia.

Quantitative hedge funds are increasing in number. Larger ones with the money to invest in research, technology and staff are becoming ever bigger while smaller quant funds struggle to keep up. Are quantitative strategies the sure-fire way to uncover and pin down alpha, as many investors are beginning to believe, or is human intervention in their implementation still all-too important? Helen Avery reports.

Tapping into the growing trend for green investing, in May CLSA Capital Partners launched Asia’s first dedicated water and waste management fund, Clean Water Asia.

It was announced on May 25 that Jack Jeffery had resigned as chief executive of electronic broking at Icap. The broker understandably moved swiftly to replace him, announcing that John Nixon would take over the role. Jeffery had overseen EBS’s integration into Icap after it was bought out from its mainly bank-consortium owners in June 2006. Jeffery joined EBS from Citi in February 2002 and he is widely credited with maintaining and then advancing EBS’s position as the market’s pre-eminent spot platform.

Russia is equally capable of fatally deterring and irresistibly attracting investors, as two recent big bank IPOs showed.

Brazil, which is already a major player in the $30 billion global trade in carbon credits, aims to hold its first online carbon credit auction this year on the São Paulo BM&F commodities and futures exchange in an initiative geared towards attracting European buyers. "We hope to reach an accord with one particular company interested in selling its credits via auction in the second half of the year," says Guilherme Magalhães Fagundes, the BM&F’s head of special projects. With a lack of liquidity in the world carbon credit market, daily trading is still some years away, but the BM&F says it aims to make the auction possible on the basis of buyer or seller demand and widen carbon credit sales away from the current business-to-business format.

Credit Suisse and Instinet, the agency broker owned by Nomura Holdings, announced in May that they had agreed to link up their proprietary "dark liquidity pools" in Japan to enable their respective international clients to trade more efficiently in Japanese securities by executing larger trades with minimal market impact.

The real action in debt capital markets has moved off the public stage.

Synapse Investment Management, which was founded in 2006 by Graeme Anderson and Mark Holman, has put itself firmly on the map with the recent hire of Rob Ford from Barclays Capital.

ABS CDOs are back buying sub-prime ABS but all remains far from well in the asset class.

Merrill Lynch and JPMorgan launch collateralized FX obligations.

Hedge funds have massively outperformed global equities over the past decade, as shown by HFI’s regional indices for the US, Europe and Asia. They have had a bright start in 2007 too.

More on Oman Blue City

lnvestors question value of ISE deal.

There is a lot of talk in Kiev about companies undertaking IPOs. Every banker and company manager has contemplated the possibilities and many have attended conferences on the subject. Does Kiev need to brace itself for an onslaught of new IPOs as the market opens up or will the local legal infrastructure and stringent international standards stop all the talk in its tracks? Chloe Hayward reports from Kiev.

The jumbo covered bond market had another banner year in 2006. A record €170 billion of issuance was accompanied by significant globalization of the market. But the growing range of structures, from an ever-expanding group of countries, is a double-edged sword, adding complexity as well as diversification.

By the start of last month it was official: the biggest collapse of a South African hedge fund had occurred. Evercrest Capital’s Evercrest Aggressive hedge fund, managed by Marc van Veen, lost 66% of its R200 million ($28.2 million) assets when it went short on Sanlam, a local insurer, betting that its shares would fall. Instead they went up by 17% in April. Local media speculate that a relatively high leverage level of five times compared with an industry average of two inspired the dramatic losses, although the exact level cannot be confirmed. However as the dust settles on Evercrest, which will be shut after just two years’ operation, questions are being asked as to how such losses can be avoided.

The recent disruption in the US sub-prime mortgage market served as a warning to the CDO market of what happens when deals are backed by increasingly risky underlying assets. So why aren’t CLO managers – who are now buying single-B rated, covenant-lite loans in their droves – paying more attention? Louise Bowman reports.

The Unifund conduit mirrors the Artesian structure that the UK bank created for water companies back in 2002.

Banks are often inclined to monitor new issue league tables for evidence of their performance in fixed income. In Euromoney’s debt poll, though, those banks’ clients get to tell their side of the story. Quality and quantity, their views suggest, by no means always equate.

VTB, Russia’s second-largest bank, made a strong debut with its initial public offering in mid-May and helped to restore faith in the entire Russian IPO market in the process. In contrast to the ham-fisted domestic share offering by market leader Sberbank in February, VTB’s transaction, which involved Russian and London listings, was widely considered to have been much better marketed, with the result that both listings attracted widespread investor support.

Yemen is the Arabian peninsula’s anomaly. With one of the world’s poorest and quickest-growing populations, it sits uneasily next to booming petrodollar earners such as nearby Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates.

Manuel Villas-Boas tells Laurence Neville how Espírito Santo Financial Group has coped with rapidly changing fortunes and what the family-owned group plans for the future.

Center Parcs points to the impact that growing private equity ownership is likely to have on CMBS structures.