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The Egyptian government has a chequered record in implementing economic reforms. Praise for the success of its major anti-corruption drive and its adoption of a free-floating exchange rate at the end of January has been tempered by the introduction of capital controls only two months later.

Issuer: Allianz Size: e3.5 billion to e4 billion Bookrunners: Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, UBS Warburg

The danger of accounting irregularities creeping up on them is the one gripe that pretty well all credit analysts have about their jobs at the moment. Post Enron, the idea of unwittingly recommending a company that turns out to have cooked its books is enough to bring on a cold sweat. "How do you predict problems such as Ahold's as an analyst? I think it's a ferociously difficult job," says Catherine Gronquist, director of international credit research at Morgan Stanley. "These demands on them have tested all credit analysts on the buy side and the sell side to practically their breaking point in some cases." This nightmare came true once again when multinational retail group Ahold admitted accounting irregularities. Standard&Poor's immediately downgraded Ahold's bonds to junk and they traded as low as 70 straight away. At press time, there was speculation that the bonds might fall even further to trade as distressed credits.

South Korea

Spain

Risk management

People in finance aren't normally shy about winning prizes. But the inaugural Asian Brokers Awards dinner had many ducking for cover - such was the fear of being nominated for and winning gongs like the "Ted Turner Award for humility" - for the region's most arrogant fund manager - and the "Leaving Las Vegas Award" - for the broker most famed for being slumped over bars nursing double scotches in the name of strengthening client relationships.

Fixed-income investing isn't an area normally associated with soul searching. can still wrongfoot us all, though. The Pimco managing director's March Investment Outlook takes a moment out from analysis of the bond markets to conduct a pensive and very personal meditation on religion, war and the author's mortality, with the help of a few carefully chosen quotations.

Roberto Junguito, finance minister of Colombia, had a good Inter-American Development Bank meeting in Milan. He secured hefty funding commitments from the IADB as well as from Andean development bank, Corporación Andina de Fomento. To top it off, he received the Euromoney award for economic achievement in the Andes from the president of CAF, Enrique García who says Hunguito is a determined negotiator. García should know: CAF has just promised Colombia $3.5 billion. Hunguito modestly shared his award with his young team. "When I was minister of finance in the 1980s, I worked with their parents," he joked.

"Guess who I had in the back of my cab," is a refrain familiar to Londoners. "Not an investment banker," might now be an appropriate response.

Pension fund trustees can find equity derivatives confusing. At the NAPF conference in Edinburgh last month a baffled but brave trustee stood up to ask how he could cut through the "black art and mumbo jumbo" of these instruments.

Mexico was the first emerging-market issuer to include collective action clauses in an SEC-registered bond. That gave it a one-off opportunity to write its own documentation unburdened by precedent. Now the CAC route looks like the clear way forward.