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Foreign companies are concerned about a requirement that they register with the SEC if they have more than 300 individual US shareholders. Buying back shares might not be the answer.

The increasing complexity of financial instruments, markets and institutions is a worry for regulators and investors. Simple, intuitive ways are needed to make risk transparent. The value-at-risk measure, although sometimes criticized on theoretical grounds (see Markus Leippold in Euromoney November 2004), has established itself as the benchmark. Christopher Lotz and Gerhard Stahl explain how regulators approach the subject of market risk management and use VaR as one among many tools.

The European High Yield Association is celebrating its fifth birthday this year under new management. Bryant Edwards, an American corporate partner in the London office of US law firm Latham & Watkins, became its new chairman last November. It has also appointed four new directors: James Amine, co-head of global leveraged finance at CSFB; Eric Cap, managing director of high-yield capital markets at JPMorgan in London; Tim Flynn, London co-head of leveraged finance at Goldman Sachs; and PricewaterhouseCoopers partner Michael Berkowitz.

Mladjan Dinkic, Serbia's 40-year-old minister of finance, says governing a country when you don't know where its borders are can be challenging. ?This is the biggest problem for us,? he says. ?It's the biggest problem for us joining the EU too.?

According to the latest research from Lehman Brothers “the life insurance industry appears to be vying with the Pentagon to see who can turn out more acronyms”.

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More inflation-linked bonds from non-sovereign European issuers could be a feature of the debt capital markets in 2005 as the inflation derivatives market grows.

Two months after the rift between the two siblings who control the $22.6 billion Reliance group became public in mid-November, the estranged brothers have not reached a settlement, fuelling speculation about an ownership split of one of India's biggest business empires.

Richard Bressler, CFO of New York-based media group Viacom, is to leave the company when his contract expires in March 2006. Bressler said he had decided that his professional future lay elsewhere. Bressler said in a statement that it had become clear that Tom Freston and Leslie Moonves, who were appointed co-president and co-chief operating officers in June 2004, needed a senior management team of their own.

Ever since George W Bush was first elected president in 2000, one of Washington's favourite guessing games has been who will be the next president of the World Bank. For the past five years, the correct answer has been ?James Wolfensohn?, the man now in his tenth year at the helm who would dearly have loved to see a fifteenth there as well.

Islamic finance has made striking advances in the past year in its prime market of Muslim individuals, sovereigns and institutions, and among non-Muslim issuers and consumers attracted to Shariah-compliant products.

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