UniCredit is one of the world’s biggest financial groups but concerns over its capital base have made it vulnerable to panic-stricken investors.

The outcry against and restrictions on short-selling of financials stocks were unjustified and ill-advised and will have a deleterious impact.

Just a few months into the chief executive role at Westpac, Gail Kelly has bought out her former employer, St George Bank. A convinced advocate of the power of branding, Kelly has pledged that St George will retain its identity. Chris Wright spoke to Kelly about the prospects for the combined entity.

Even Kazakh bank employees are joining investors in a flight to quality away from the sector. BTA Bank and Kazkommertzbank are overwhelmed by foreign debt too eagerly lent out at home and only Halyk is in good shape. Although there are still a few potential foreign buyers nosing around Kazakh financial assets, Raiffeisen for one has decided that its ambitions in the country will be best fulfilled through a greenfield operation. Elliot Wilson reports.

Is the new Nomura a threat to the dominant investment banks in the Asia-Pacific region?

Eurasia Capital Management (ECM) has created the first-ever Uzbekistan-dedicated hedge fund. The Uzbekistan Growth Fund was launched in September with initial capital of just $5 million but ECM founder and managing partner Alisher Ali Djumanov believes that the open-ended investment vehicle could grow substantially over the next couple of years.

Citi hired seven sales bankers from Lehman Brothers’ interest rates team last month. It comes as the administrator of Lehman’s remaining European business announced 750 job cuts, predominantly in fixed income, on September 30.

Mian Mansha owns one of the best banks in Asia but his ambitions reach much further. His empire incorporates insurance, cement, textiles, infrastructure and power generation. In his first-ever interview with the foreign media, he tells Elliot Wilson of his plans to list his holding company on the London Stock Exchange within the next two years, and expand across Asia into the Middle East, emerging Europe and beyond.

JPMorgan stopped counterparty trading with Citadel last month in protest at the $20 billion hedge fund’s recent hires of the bank’s staff. Employees at JPMorgan were told to stop trading stocks, bonds and currencies with Citadel. However, the dispute lasted only 24 hours. Both parties declined to comment but sources say relations between the two firms began to sour in March, when Patrik Edsparr left JPMorgan to run Europe and fixed income for Citadel. There have been several other hires from JPMorgan since that time, more lately Brian McDonald, formerly a managing director and senior portfolio manager with the US bank’s ABS Principal Investments Group. The final straw, though was the hire of Greg Boester, an adjustable-rate mortgage securities trader with the bank.

Insurers troubles spill over causing retail panic.

The growth in Islamic finance has slowed with the deepening credit crunch but the Saudi Binladin Group has raised the first sukuk for the world’s most holy boom town: Mecca.

Having brushed with Indonesian politics, Gita Wirjawan knows how dirty it can be. Business development has more to offer his country, he reckons, hence his Indonesia-centric private equity business Ancora, which is attracting investors from the wider Muslim world. Eric Ellis reports.

It will take months if not years before we know with any certainty who the ultimate winners from the financial crisis will be. But having purchased the US businesses of Lehman Brothers it seems that Barclays Capital will be among them.

Surely it was high time Lloyds TSB made a life-changing acquisition? Surely it had the balance sheet to do so? And surely assets were available at a never-to-be-repeated price? Philip Moore put these questions to Lloyds’ finance director less than a month before its shotgun wedding with HBOS. It’s clear that making a transformational deal for the UK bank was only a matter of time.

A week after Lehman Brothers collapsed, the United Arab Emirates central bank announced a new credit line of a dirham equivalent of $14 billion. Was it a signal to investors that the federation would not sit by and watch as the economy of Dubai – its second-biggest constituent – went into free fall?

Hank Paulson’s desperate attempts to keep the world financial system afloat show that, despite his many qualities, he is the wrong man for the job. Clive Horwood and Peter Lee report.

The rapid and decisive intervention of European national authorities to prop up vulnerable banks might well limit the extent of European banks’ funding problems.