Morgan Stanley has made its most senior investment banking hire since John Mack took over as chief executive last year and since the departure of one of its star M&A bankers, vice-chairman Joe Perella, one of the key defectors during the turmoil at the bank in the first half of last year.

International banks have been encouraged to re-enter the Saudi project finance market with big-ticket deals backed by a relatively healthy risk environment and more solid financial guarantees than in the past. Nigel Dudley reports.

Q&A with Bill Browder, founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, the biggest foreign investor in Russia.

Euromoney’s investigation into the global FX market in 2006 – seven years before the fixing controversy - revealed the scale of the practice of banks’ pre-empting, or front-running, clients' FX orders.

The rush of foreign investment into central and eastern Europe has undoubtedly improved standards of corporate governance. But the results of this year’s Euromoney survey of the best companies in the region reveal that some state-owned companies that might prove difficult to acquire also rate highly for their management standards. Lawrence White reports.

China-focused forestry company falls behind in land acquisition.

The bridge loan Softbank has taken out to acquire Vodafone in Japan is enormous, negotiated on onerous terms and costly by Japanese standards.

IMF responds to Nielsen accusations

Convertibles have regained popularity in M&A because of the types of deals being done.

With EU accession for Croatia still a few years away, the country’s financial authorities are focusing their attention on developing the local bond market. Oonagh Leighton reports.

Regarding Euromoney's March 2006 cover story: “Inside Argentina’s financial crisis” written by Guillermo Nielsen, Argentina’s former finance secretary.

State Bank of India has decided to enter India’s rapidly growing market for securitized assets.

The capital markets are something of an open goal for debt issuers at the moment – spreads are tight, and investors want to put their money to work.

News of the first RMBS transaction out of Saudi Arabia has focused attention on the potential for real estate-backed issuance from the region.

Will US issuers start to look at Europe’s institutional markets?

After a few years of dormancy, convertible bond issuance in emerging Europe and the Middle East is picking up again. A few innovative and highly structured deals have priced this year and bankers are confident of more transactions. Sudip Roy reports on factors driving the activity and the types of investors involved.

BNP Paribas has topped the investment grade section of the Euromoney credit research poll for the past three years but this success has not stood in the way of a shift to a new research model.

Hybrid structured products – cross-asset-class investments – are finally starting to make a significant impact with investors. Banks report increasing demand from those looking to trade several market views via a single instrument to instantly reap the benefits of portfolio diversification. But with increasing sales come new challenges, such as the pricing of correlation. How are hybrid structured product makers faring?

Investors will have to wait for deals to burn out before prepayments in European CMBS transactions begin to ease.

The central Asian republic may still be developing suitable funding channels, but a pick-up in deals is expected, given an economy that continues to grow and an appropriate legal framework. Patrick Gill reports.

Three years ago, the Romanian government had to admit defeat in its plans to privatize Banca Comerciala Romana, the country’s largest bank. By last autumn, though, when bidding was reopened, nine banks submitted bids and the bank was eventually sold at 5.8 times book value – a record at that time in central Europe. So what changed?

ITG and Merrill Lynch have joined forces in a joint venture called “Block Alert, powered by Posit” that will create a global block order crossing service.

After having been unseated as CEO of Deutsche Börse by hedge funds, Werner Seifert has concluded that the hectic race for alpha will destroy capitalism. Euromoney looks at Seifert’s passionate espousal of good old corporate values.

ResCap was able to pay back its domestic debt owed to GMAC ahead of market expectations following a $3.5 billion multi-tranche transaction ($1 billion of three-year sub, and $2.5 billion of senior – split into $1.75 billion of seven-year and $750 million of three-year).

The most representative annual FX poll Euromoney has conducted to date examines a market in which technology shapes the present and the future, and the buy side is unwilling to break the bank when buying services. In a growing market that demands huge expenditure and promises little return, banks have to position themselves well to stay in the game. Florian Neuhof reports.

Central Asia, a stronghold for dictators, poverty and corruption, doesn’t at first glance seem to offer fertile ground for high investment returns. But this is precisely what some of the region’s more intrepid investors hope to find and profit from. Kathryn Wells spends a week on the road with two hedge fund managers, on the lookout for opportunities on this new frontier.

Goldman Sachs has reshuffled its Latin American investment banking team by naming Eduardo Centola and Martin Werner as co-heads.

A compulsory minimum free float for banks listing in Russia is illogical, hard to police and might not be in investors’ best interests.

Saudi Arabia’s stock market regulator, the Capital Markets Authority, is in an invidious position. At the start of the year CMA officials tried in vain to warn naive retail investors about the dangers of piling into the under-researched, thinly traded speculative stocks that comprise nearly a quarter of the country’s public companies. They were ignored: dismissed as interfering, risk-averse bureaucrats. The market, driven by rising corporate profitability resulting from the high oil price, rose to absurd levels.

US bank is surprising frontrunner in league tables.