Issuer: Jazztel

During the apartheid years and beyond corporate South Africa assembled unwieldy conglomerates to utilize domestic assets that could not be employed elsewhere. Now an economy that is opening up is going through a process of reshuffling and unbundling, with private-equity firms taking an increasingly important role. Richard Stovin-Bradford reports.

It is flattering to be remembered by Paul Roby so long after the event (letter, "Begging to differ" April, page 13).

Edson Mitchell is usually credited with Deutsche Bank's rise up the debt-capital markets league tables over the past four years, and not without reason. He was brought in because of his earlier success in turning Merrill Lynch from an also-ran of the US bulge-bracket banks in the mid-1980s into the undisputed leader by 1994, and has turned Deutsche into a leading contender in just four years.

In the 1980s, John Gutfreund was the "King of Wall Street". The soberly dressed former municipal bond trader would arrive at work each morning with a reputed readiness to "bite the ass off a bear".

If one institution best demonstrates the effects of the Asian and Russian crises on a bank, ING Barings is it. It's a salutary tale of billion dollar losses, of individuals left to go their own way at the expense of group strategy, of management failures. Now ING Barings has one last chance and it's down to two men to turn it round. Nick Kochan reports.

A revolution in securities settlement will make Emu and Y2K look like child's play. And it will be the death knell of custody as we know it. Increasingly, custodians see their business as information, not safe-keeping. Meanwhile the consolidation continues. James Rutter reports.

M&A: Europe plays the takeover game