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Awards of Excellence

In these acquisitive times, a bank needs to find a cost-efficient means of funding its ambitions. In the recent takeover squabble for Belgium's Générale de Banque, ABN Amro suggested that it would issue $1 billion worth of preferred stock in order to help fund its, ultimately unsuccessful, bid.

This autumn, after the annual IMF/World Bank meeting is over, the men and women responsible for raising money for six of the smaller states in the euro zone will hold a private meeting in Portugal to discuss ways of ensuring that their interests are given as much weight as those of the area's largest sovereign borrowers. They will try to build a coordinated approach on issues such as a euro-zone borrowing calendar and establishing common standards for primary dealers. In the longer term some bankers believe they will be able to plan joint bond issues for more than one country in the same way that German Länder have made joint borrowings.

Crossing capital market boundaries

When Nicholas Brady left the US treasury department at the end of the Bush administration, it was something of a no-brainer to figure out what to do next. Why not invest in the Latin American countries that his work in developing Brady bonds had helped get on the track to privatization? Starting up in 1994, his company, Darby Overseas Investors, raised $150 million for a private equity fund, one of the first of its kind for Latin America.

A wave of venture-capital deals financed byhigh-yield debt modelled on US practice has hit Europe. But as Christopher Stoakes explains, the legal intricacies of these dealsare often different in Europe and the US.

Awards of Excellence

The biggest money-laundering investigation ever carried out by the US authorities cast its net wide. Operation Casablanca uncovered trails in Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela and indicted some highly respectable banks. Some have now launched internal investigations into what went wrong. But how much are banks to blame when money laundering goes on under their roofs? Michelle Celarier reports.

June 17 1998 is a date that will stick in the mind of Bob Diamond for a while. Not because his speech, '"Give me credit baby", A European bank's perspective on the importance of credit research', went down so well at Euromoney's latest Global Borrowers and Investors Forum - though his was one of the wittier and more provocative offerings. No, the chief executive of Barclays Capital is more likely to remember his debut as a catwalk model at his firm's well-attended party at London's trendiest new hotel, the Hempel.

The tequila crisis, Asian fallout, money laundering charges - Mexican bankers walk a tortured road. Nor is there any sign of reprieve. Fobaproa, the vehicle that bailed out the country's banks, is about to undergo a public audit. The political opposition is demanding blood for what they see as the mishandling of the crisis. Bankers are again in the firing line. Brian Caplen reports.

When investment bankers turn to writing, few professional scribes lose sleep over the competition. A banker's motivation for putting pen to paper is often either ego or epitaph. Neither makes for a gripping read. A book by Bruce Wasserstein, co-founder of New York M&A boutique Wasserstein Perella, might therefore be expected to be met with scepticism.

A year ago Deutsche Morgan Grenfell was set to challenge the US global investment banks. Then Frankfurt jammed on the brakes. A bank-wide restructuring has left DMG - now just the global corporate and institutions (GCI) department of Deutsche Bank - a pale shadow of its former self. Did the Deutsche Bank board lose its nerve or does it truly believe it can have an investment-banking culture without the investment bankers who inspired it?