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Saxo Bank has decided to open an office in Milan in response to strong growth in Italy. The bank says its Italian private client business grew by 48% in 2008 and that FX volumes expanded by 78%. The Milan office, which will be run by Torben Rene Larsen, will focus on FX trading, although the bank says it will also offer the full range of its products. As a result, can we expect Saxo’s cycling team to feature prominently in this year’s Giro d’Italia, which starts in May?

A rumour swept the market this week that BofA/Merrill had decided to increase the base salaries of its staff now that bonuses have become political. This is a sensitive issue, but the move – which I’m led to believe will be confirmed in April – is not surprising. Other tier 1 banks, including UBS, have, apparently done the same. “My mate at Merrill says people are leaving to go to tier 2 and 3 banks that are looking to upgrade,” was the way one source explained it.

Nobody should have any doubt how seriously the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission is taking its task of stamping out FX-related fraud. This week it has announced that it has charged Barki LLC of Mint Hill, North Carolina, and its founder Bruce Kramer with “fraudulently soliciting at least $40 million to trade leveraged foreign currency contracts, misappropriating at least $30 million of customer funds to pay purported profits, return principal to customers, and for personal expenses. The defendants concealed their fraud and trading losses through false account statements for over five years.”

Given the pressures of the libel laws that us journos have to work under, the list will likely remain hidden from print.

I was sent word this week of a senior broker who has come up with a great way of extracting some yield on the chalet he owns in Chamonix. He rents it to his company – for top dollar I’m told – which then uses it to entertain clients. I always knew he was clever.

What a difference a week makes. The FX market may have appeared to be settling down, but Switzerland’s decision to cut rates, introduce quantative easing as well as intervene and sell some CHF served as a reminder that we’re not moving back to a low-volatility environment just yet. The Fed’s decision to start buying treasuries and massively inflate US money supply had an even bigger effect. My thanks to all the banks who have sent me their excellent research, which has helped me understand what is going on and what may yet occur. The market’s gyrations have no doubt caused some sleepless nights, but overall I’m sure they will be welcomed as they highlight the need to manage FX risk effectively and the importance of having a professional workforce that can do that.

According to the Moscow Times, the Kremlin has published its priorities for the upcoming G20 meeting, one of which is the creation of a supranational reserve currency. It wants the IMF to investigate the possibility of increasing the reserve currencies in its Special Drawing Rights.

As regular readers will know, I sometimes hint that the questions I ask in researching this column are not always completely truthfully answered.

Adrian Walkling has quit UBS, where he was co-head of FICC Distribution, EMEA. He is believed to be headed for a senior sales role at Standard Chartered in Singapore.

Matt Brady will be hoping that having jumped from the fat and into the fire he has now finally moved to a cooler seat at a more solid institution. Brady joined HBOS in Sydney as its chief dealer FX last June after fleeing ABN Amro following the bank’s takeover by RBS. Now that HBOS has staged its own implosion and been consumed by Lloyds, Brady has moved on again – this time to JPMorgan as an executive director in spot FX trading. Brady, who apparently did a fantastic job for HBOS in the brief time he was there, is regarded as one of the best traders in the Sydney market.

ClientKnowledge has hired Parham Zolfaghari as its product manager for its managed models business line. Zolfaghari, who was previously at BNP Paribas, will manage a team of five quantitative analysts and report to Justyn Trenner. ClientKnowledge says it has 10 clients using its models and it anticipates this to increase.

Chris Allington has resigned from his role as co-head of G10 currency trading at the combined Bank of America/Merrill Lynch. Allington, who was confirmed in the role alongside Chris Vogel in early January, is well respected in the industry; he has also been described as David Gu’s right-hand man. Gu, who is the bank’s global head of rates, has recently been under some pressure as a result of the large bonus he received for 2008, as well as the discovery of an unexpected and large loss discovered in the books of one of his interest rate traders.