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If corporate competitiveness is defined by a willingness to offshore jobs then a recent survey suggests UK corporates are leading the way by planning to move 3% of its jobs offshore over the next ten years.

As the November deadline approaches for compliance with the UK Combined Code on Corporate Governance, there is a clear division between companies who are going out of their way to reassure investors and those that are making little effort at all.

As the CFO, exactly how much capital did you put aside to cope with the compliance costs for Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley act? The capital almost certainly isn?t enough. That?s the conclusion from a recent survey by the Financial Executives International (FEI) showing costs for compliance are more than 60% higher than estimates made only six months ago. The total cost of compliance for the average company in FEI?s July survey amounts to $3.14 million; a rise from $1.93 million in the FEI?s January survey.

Target: MobilTel EAD, Bulgarian mobile phone network operator. Established in 1994, MobilTel is the largest mobile phone operator in Bulgaria with 2.7 million subscribers and a turnover of ?432 million ($533 million) in 2003.

The bond and equity markets in Europe are set to outperform the US over the next two years as the two region?s economies diverge from each other, according to a report from ABN Amro.

Finance directors have been eyeing the looming deadline for IAS 32/39 with some trepidation for some time now. One option for combating the question of hedge accounting requirements, at least as far as many software vendors are concerned, is for CFOs to implement software solutions. Trema, the software provider for financial institutions, has launched its hedge accounting module to cope with the fair value accounting regulations under IAS39 and to provide support for FAS 133/138. Trema proposes to reduce the labour intensive process of hedge accounting by introducing software to deal with: cashflow hedging; fair value hedging, and; net investment hedging. FX and interest rate hedging are also included in the package.

US and international companies are taking advantage of brief periods of low bond yields to issue into the hungry US market.

Private equity is driving the M&A market, with leveraged buy-outs (LBOs) in the first six months of the year at their highest level since 1998.

The Bank of England?s recent quarter-point rise in interest rates will add £700 million ($1.28 billion) a year to the costs of the UK?s 100 largest companies, according to a study by REL Consulting Group.

Analyst neglect of UK small-cap and mid-cap stocks subtracts £8 billion ($14.7 billion) from the capitalization of the UK equity market, according to UK research boutique Equity Development. Comparing the valuations of stocks for which there are nil, one, two, or more than three analysts publishing research, Equity Development found discounts for neglect in 75% of the sectors for which there is useable data.

Although many governments will keep pushing loose fiscal policies, capital repricing is inevitable ? probably led by the ECB. That lead should favour the euro and European bonds, at least for a while