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A new investment banking boutique has been established to service clients in the Baltics and the Commonwealth of Independent States looking for moderate-yield, low-volatility investment opportunities. Maximus Capital is headquartered in the Latvian capital, Riga, but also has offices in Baku, Kiev, London and Moscow.

Greek banks’ share prices plummeted in 2008 – even before Lehman collapsed. Despite this, as well as higher inflation, slower economic growth and more taxes, they have ploughed on with ambitious regional expansion plans. Can Greek banks defy the global financial crisis? Dominic O’Neill reports from Athens.

The recent turbulence at the heart of Pakistan’s political machine raised significant but nuanced questions for Mian Mansha. The two individuals publicly responsible for ousting Pervez Musharraf as president – former premier Nawaz Sharif, and Asif Ali Zardari, the current president and widower of the late prime minister Benazir Bhutto – are also prominent members of the country’s rich list. Zardari, second in the rankings, is worth an estimated $1.8 billion, while Sharif, ousted as premier in 1999 by Musharraf, is worth $1.4 billion (but possibly as much as five times that tally), largely thanks to his shareholding in the Lahore-based Ittefaq Group, founded by Sharif’s father, Muhammad.

Unibanco, which has a 52% stake in Brazilian insurance joint venture Unibanco AIG, is looking at buying the remaining share of the company if it goes on sale. The unit’s president, Jose Rudge, hinted in a conference call in September that Unibanco had the first right of refusal for the 48% share. "We are very attuned to opportunities that may arise from this and would analyse the opportunity to buy if it were for sale," says Rudge, adding that this would be a natural step for Unibanco. He declined to comment on whether AIG had offered to sell, or if Unibanco was in direct acquisition talks.

A week, they say, is a long time in politics. We now know that a week can be an eternity in the financial markets, especially when it starts with Lehman Brothers going bust and ends with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley becoming licensed deposit takers so that they can snuggle closer to the Federal Reserve. Oh, and in between, you had the rescue of the largest US insurance company, AIG and the proposed Stalinization of US capitalism financed by the Land of the Free’s taxpayers.

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.

Mian Mansha owns one of the best banks in Asia but his ambitions reach much further. He plans to create a new holding company and list his various interests on the LSE. And he hopes to expand his business base across Asia and into the Middle East and emerging Europe.

Despite initial fears, the foreign exchange market appears to have handled Lehman Brothers’ collapse into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection remarkably well. According to Rob Close, chief executive of CLS Bank, which settles the bulk of the market’s transactions, few deals that had Lehman as a counterparty were rescinded.

Insurers troubles spill over causing retail panic.

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

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.

JPMorgan has unveiled a new e-commerce offering. Developed internally, the platform, MorganDirect, can be used to trade spot, forwards and outrights from either desktops or BlackBerries, 24 hours a day. MorganDirect will provide streaming rates for more than 300 currency pairs and the bank says that other products and assets will be added in due course. Elsewhere, JPMorgan has replaced AIG as the central counterparty on Currenex’s FXTrades platform.