Search results for

In the week that South Korea sought IMF assistance and Yamaichi announced bankruptcy, it was easy to miss the tiny column inches devoted to Jardine Fleming's flagging results. The latest figures show a continued decline in the Hong Kong-based investment bank's profitability. In the first half of 1997 it made a net profit of $29 million, meaning its contribution to parent Robert Fleming's profits had reached an all-time low of 16% of the Scottish bank's earnings. This is down from 28.8% last year, and well short of the target 25% to 33% Fleming wants.

Peregrine's still flying

The pack of acquisitive admirers circling around Patria Finance, Prague's much respected investment-banking firm, is growing bigger. Komercni Banka, the Czech Republic's biggest bank, made the first approach. Then came international investment banks, with Fleming and Merrill Lynch reputedly among them.

Issuer: Eesti Uhispank (Union Bank of Estonia)

A crinkle in the English law of security has been more or less ironed out - but don't ask for an opinion on it yet. By Christopher Stoakes.

Michael von Clemm, former chairman of CSFB and Merrill Lynch Capital Markets, died on November 6 at the age of 62.

It's a simple idea. You own most of a company so you control its fate. But this notion of shareholder value has been slow to reach continental Europe where governments often allow small groups of long-term shareholders to control public companies. Things are starting to change. Cross-border mergers - even hostile foreign bids - are becoming more common, debt-financed deals are supplanting stock swaps and companies are making big acquisitions using hybrid tradable loans. Michelle Celarier reports on the Americanization of European M&A.

Trade finance used to be a less glamourous part of the business. But times have changed. Banks have seen there's money to be made if deals are intricately structured and widely traded. That means building teams with the required expertise. When a trade financier's phone rings now it could well be a headhunter offering a better package. Rupert Wright reports on the new dynamism.

"Why Walter?" asked even senior staff at Dresdner Bank when Bernhard Walter was designated as the bank's next chief executive. From outside German banking came a simpler query: "Who is Walter?" So far, Walter has made no attempt to shed light on either mystery.

Ranjan Marwah is by no means low profile. One of the first things to catch the eye in his penthouse office is an oil painting of him in an eighteenth century wig, sitting on a horse with his wife beside him. It has the unlikely look of a Mogul emperor painted by Thomas Gainsborough. Marwah is a kind of emperor in his own way. He founded, built and still runs Executive Access, one of Asia's biggest headhunting firms, which derives 72% of its revenues from banking and finance.

Forget forced devaluations, plummeting stock markets and widening bond yields, south-east Asia's greatest headache is its weak banking sector. While central bankers looked the other way, the region's banks lent heavily to finance stock-market speculation, overexposed themselves to property and made dubious loans to their own shareholders. As Maggie Ford reports, it is time for the reckoning.

Following currency devaluations and stock-market crashes, Asia now faces its biggest challenge: a full-blown credit crunch. No big bond issues will be done for the rest of the year, spreads on outstanding bonds have gone haywire and trading has ground to a halt. Local sources of credit have also dried up. Corporate borrowers can expect little help from their bankers; devaluation has blasted a hole in many local banks' balance sheets and they have no money to lend even if they wanted to. Peter Lee reports on the likely shape of things to come.