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Private equity, venture capital or merchant banking - whatever you call it - is a hot area that banks and investors are piling into in Europe, importing US-style aggression and leverage techniques. It's not quite the fear and greed of the 1980s, but a market correction could shake some of the less prudent off their perch. Peter Lee reports.

When it comes to infrastructure projects, this is the big one - an engineering feat on a par with the Great Wall of China. But as well as flooding 600 kilometres of the Yangzi valley, the Three Gorges dam could cause a deluge of arguments among the foreign banks and contractors lining up to get involved. Jack Lowenstein reports on some early signs of trouble and picks out the project's likely backers.

On the basis of his CV, Charles Frank appears to have been planning to join a multilateral organization all his career. He has strong academic credentials, experience in government as well as an impressive track record in banking and project finance.

Two years and that's your lot. At least that's the usual practice for heads of borrowing at Korea Development Bank (KDB). So Duck-Soo Kim's departure after three and half years in the job was  if anything  a bit overdue. The new man is Young-Jin Lee.

A frenzy of deal-making has broken out in Indonesia as corporates rush to unload their stakes in everything from property and industrial subsidiaries to banks and finance companies in the wake of the currency and stock market crisis.

Last National Bank of Boot Hill

On October 3, Barclays chief executive Martin Taylor announced he was selling the equities and corporate finance divisions of his investment bank BZW. Only five weeks earlier he'd hired a high-profile banker to head BZW France. And only a year ago Taylor lured Bill Harrison from Robert Fleming to revamp the very divisions he's now put on the block. What went wrong? And what does it say about British banking's most celebrated chief executive? By Antony Currie.

To say that Chip Kruger is not well known in London is an understatement. Few UK bank analysts have met him or know much about him except that he used to co-run Greenwich Capital Markets, a successful bond-trading business in Connecticut, that was acquired by NatWest.

Just last spring, Raiffeisen Zentralbank, or RZB, had virtually no profile in the capital-markets industry of eastern Europe; the bank was known mainly in its domestic market, Austria, where it is a high-street bank with 2,500 branches. Last year the London office of RZB took up only a few floors of a non-descript building on a tiny side street. But over the past few months, the bank has shaken off its sleepy origins and has started actively poaching staff from larger firms and aggressively expanding into sales, trading, research and, more recently, investment banking.

The Kalff interview

The Kalff interview