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Since its creation in February 2001, Agence France Trésor has deftly managed the French Republic's funding programme. From opening a new euro zone inflation linked market to embarking on the biggest swap programme by a EU government, it has pushed forward the French government debt market in a transparent and measured fashion. Here, chief executive Sylvain de Forges shares his thoughts with Neil Day on the early life of the agency.

The reform of a law that has shattered the hopes of many companies looking to raise money through a secondary offering of shares in France is once again at the forefront of debate. Bankers have struggled for a long time against the 10-from-20 law, which states that a secondary offering of primary shares without rights cannot be priced below the average of 10 closing prices chosen from 20 days before the close of the offering.

Barely a week passes without one firm or another announcing a restructuring of its investment banking operations in a bid to boost shareholder returns. But what's in it for the corporates that rely on the banks for their capital markets advice and services? And how objective can advice aimed at winning business be? The industry waits to see if banks and borrowers can both win, or if the relationship will always be a zero sum game.

When Bayer held a beauty parade last year to choose banks for the financing of its Eu7.25bn acquisition of Aventis CropScience, the winners turned out to be three of the banks that have been championing their balance sheet capacity. But rather than showing that big is beautiful, Bayer's selection process highlighted how borrowers are becoming more sophisticated in getting the most out of bank relationships.

Many corporates are today having to rethink their approach to rethinking their balance sheets - some of them, at least, the victims of exuberance while capital was cheap and the stockmarkets were booming. Yet corporate treasurers are having to rely on advice from many of the same bankers that will have helped them get their companies into difficulties.

With a buoyant short dated market and less recourse to bank lending, French corporates were quick to learn the lexicon of the debt capital markets. By the time the euro was introduced, concepts such as disintermediation and diversification were already part of their vocabulary. This fluency in the language of the bond markets means that they are well prepared to compete on the international stage. Neil Day reports.

Think of European structured finance, and you picture Abbey National, Dutch mortgages and a flood of Italian leasing transactions. French securitisation does not usually spring to mind, with its limited field of repeat issuers and one-off transactions. But as Lisa Miles discovers, France has a lively and growing market with big-name deals in the pipeline, and may be worth a second look.

The opening up of the French market has been one of the great success stories of the European syndicated loan market over the past three years. Once a country where borrowers rarely used the loan market and when they did they stuck closely to their domestic house banks, France has become one of the most important sources of business for European syndicated loans teams. Toby Fildes reports.

In a remarkably short space of time, France has become one of the most important leveraged finance markets in Europe. Dealflow has been strong this year, partly as a result of the large French companies continuing to restructure and spin off non-core businesses but also because of the high number of international private equity sponsors active in France. Toby Fildes reports.

ABN AMRO is expected to launch this week the first credit-linked note using the weightings of the iBoxx index, a European fixed income index jointly complied by seven market makers. The CLN is referenced to a portfolio of the index's 50 largest corporates by outstanding debt, according to officials familiar with the note. Officials at ABN declined comment.

BNP Paribas has hired Mark Alexandridis, head of credit derivatives at Gen Re Securities, as head of its North American credit derivatives business in New York, where he is in charge of all sales, trading and structuring within the region, according to a BNP official. Alexandridis started at the French bank last month.

BNP Paribas has lost three more of its equity derivatives professionals, this time to CDC IXIS Capital Markets and Banc of America Securities. Jason Megson, v.p. in single stock trading, and Michael Nevin, v.p. in equity derivatives sales, have joined CDC and Raj Malhotra, v.p. in index trading, has joined BofA. All have taken similar positions, according to officials familiar with the situation. The firm had already lost Jim Xu, an equity derivatives trader, (DW, 5/19) Kent Oz, head of financial institutional sales, (DW, 5/3) and Vuk Bulajic, head of U.S. equity derivatives (DW, 4/29).