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For those who couldn't make the Euromoney Awards for Excellence dinner on July 15, the hot ticket was Deutsche Bank's global derivatives conference in Barcelona. After dinner at the grand Finca Mas Solers in the hills above the the nearby resort of Sitges, Deutsche executives and their clients were treated to a private performance from diminutive Australian diva Kylie Minogue.

Despite Banco Santander?s headline-grabbing takeover offer for Abbey National, it is the consistent growth in domestic M&A that is the real good news for Europe.

Concern over regulatory compliance among corporate treasurers has soared to 30% in 2004 ? a six-fold increase on 2003 levels, according to a poll conducted by Treasury Strategies. Almost 80% of corporate treasurers, the poll reports, are undergoing projects, or have plans to do so, based on Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. Financing and credit concerns, followed by the use of technology and cash management top the list of priorities for corporate treasurers in 2004, while the survey also reports negligible changes in staffing levels.

The European Commission has announced an investigation into the regulation of rating agencies, calling for evidence that could lead to legislation on the issue.

Four companies in the Asian Formosa Group have issued the largest simultaneous four-in-one convertible bond in the region to date, for $1 billion. Formosa Petrochemicals, Formosa Plastics, Nan Ya Plastics and Formosa Chemicals & Fibre have each simultaneously issued $250 million in bonds exchangeable into shares of Formosa Petrochemicals.

The leveraged lending market is heading for its best year since 1998 due to an increased number of M&A deals, according to a report from Piper Jaffray, the securities firm. Arrangers launched $124 billion of leveraged loans in the first half of 2004, up from $80 billion in the second six months of 2003 and on course for 1998?s year-end figure of $256 billion.

Russia?s gas monopoly Gazprom has increased its debt issue to $1.25 billion after being swamped with demand for the country?s first investment grade bond. The company sold an extra $250 million after it received $6 billion in investor demand for the bonds, which are also the first securitized notes to be issued out of Russia.

ABN AMRO has launched MiniSwaps, a product allowing corporates, fund managers and institutions to trade and hedge interest rate risk. Regulatory or credit legislations has prevented some market participants from trading derivative contracts but the open-ended securities, says ABN AMRO, will open the market. MiniSwaps are priced at intrinsic value with no time value element and, importantly, trade like securities rather than derivatives with price linked to the prevailing level of the underlying interest rate.

A House vote in the US on July 20 has quashed the proposed expensing of stock options by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). A number of industry bodies in the US ? notably the IT industry ? have been lobbying for the dismantling of FASB?s expensing proposals; they have clearly succeeded. The legislation, HR 3574, would require that only those options granted to the top five officers of a corporation be expensed and options granted to other employees would require footnote notation only. Further, the expensing model required under the legislation would use zero as the volatility factor in the equation.

Almost two-thirds of US companies have accepted Sarbanes-Oxley as part of their wider approach to corporate governance while 30% still view the requirements as a separate goal. This is the finding from PricewaterhouseCoopers? latest management barometer report. The majority of surveyed corporates stand in agreement. Sixty-two per cent have integrated Sarbanes-Oxley into their regulatory compliance processes, while over a third have yet to do so.

More than half of US companies have not completed preparations in meeting their Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 filing requirements. This, according to a survey by ACL Services and the Centre for Continuous Auditing (CCA), is despite an extension of the 404 deadline from June 15 to November 15 2004. Section 404, which requires corporate management teams to assess internal controls, is just one component of the Sarbanes-Oxley issues. Fines and jail time, claim the surveys? authors, can be the result of non-compliance with Section 404. So it is surprising that more than two-thirds of US corporations possess no annual budget to maintain its compliance.

Islamic finance has broken another barrier with news of the first European based and backed Islamic bond (sukuk) to be issued by the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. The ?100 million of sukuks will be issued at the end of July. The bonds, which must comply with sharia?ah rulings, do not represent borrowing by the named entity, the most notable prohibition with sharia?ah compliance being the illegality of interest bearing accounts. A further complication is the existence of four schools of Islamic law which can provide differing interpretations on compliance.