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Merrill Lynch has hired Tim Skeet as a covered bond product specialist reporting to Amir Hoveyda, European head of debt capital markets. He joins Merrill from ABN Amro where he was head of financial institutions origination for Germany and France. He joined the Dutch bank at the start of 2003, before that he held a senior FIG relationship banker role at Barclays Capital. Skeet is a veteran of the debt capital markets and one of the best-known faces in the covered bond sector. He started in the business some 25 years ago at Samuel Montagu.

Southern Cross Group is making waves in Latin American private equity, standing out because of its aggressive and sometimes contentious strategy – it only invests in companies in which it has unchallenged control of management – which is bringing it high returns.

The expected evolution of opco propco to the pub sector failed to materialize in May when Robert Tchenguiz’s Globe Pub Company opted for a whole business structure to fund the the ex-Spirit pub portfolio.

ZFS’s activist approach to the capital markets and the success of its unique turnaround story makes it insurance borrower of the year.

I was lunching at Cecconi’s with my friend Richard. Cecconi’s is an Italian restaurant in Mayfair frequented by hedge fund hotties, Latvian lovelies with pneumatic mammaries and the odd voyeur such as myself. Dame Marjorie Scardino, chief executive of publishing group Pearson – or her doppelganger – was at the next table. Regretfully, under my Cecconi classification system, she falls into the voyeur category. Well she’s hardly a buxom Latvian is she? Richard is the brother I never had. He is funny, clever, irreverent and, in his spare time, a successful investment banker. If he weren’t one of my closest friends, I would hate him for the insouciance of it all.

Dmitry Eropkin, president of Russia’s Impexbank, said as Raiffeisen completed its acquisition of his bank that he expected to see “the consolidation of the top 50 Russian banks within the next two to three years”.

The alternative investment manager has rewritten the rule book in structured credit this year thanks to its breathtaking pace of innovation.

Access to collateral is the number one topic of conversation in the CLO market. But if a viable leveraged loan CDS market develops, Christmas will have come early for many players.

Love them or loathe them, institutional investors are now an increasingly important fact of life for LBO financial sponsors. CLOs now account for more than 30% of the market in Europe and are starting to venture into every part of the LBO structure. But if things go wrong, there is now a fund manager across the workout table, not a friendly banker. Louise Bowman reports.

Investors have welcomed Thailand’s largest IPO for years with open arms. The problem is that those investors are in Singapore, not Bangkok. The failure to list one of the kingdom’s prize assets at home is symptomatic of much larger problems in the country. Chris Leahy reports.

Who would hand over millions of dollars to a management group of a publicly listed company that does nothing, has no business strategy, has no assets and might never have any assets? But that’s what’s happening as more and more special purpose acquisition companies list. Why won’t the banks leading the deals talk about them?

If stock markets are too volatile, the USD weak, interest rates rising and risk aversion rising everywhere, where can an investor turn his attention. Russia’s time may have come.