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New Flag Asset Management, the specialist high yield fund manager, has continued to build out its senior staff with the appointment of two marketing directors, Leendert Meijaard and Andrew Holmes. The moves follow the recent announcement that Robin Monro-Davis, CEO of Fitch ratings agency until retiring at the end of last year, is to increase his involvement at New Flag by becoming executive chairman. Meijaard joins from Fidelity, where he was director of institutional marketing, while Holmes comes over from CSFB where he was director of acquisition and leveraged finance origination. He was previously at JP Morgan for six years.

The Republic of Italy, the largest and most innovative European sovereign borrower, is to launch its first ever syndicated BTP and its first with a 15 year maturity. The deal will be launched in February by Citigroup/SSSB, ING Barings and UniCredit Banca Mobiliare. Maria Cannata, director general for public debt at the Italian treasury, told EuroWeek that the change in law on the fiscal treatment of BTPs for foreign investors, which became effective on January 1, 2002, has produced strong interest in Italian debt from accounts that were unwilling to participate before because of the difficulties of reclaiming withholding tax. "This increased interest makes us confident that a new maturity in the format of BTPs has a great chance of being a success," she said.

Investec PMG, the US investment banking arm of South Africa-based group Investec, has expanded in TMT and life sciences, two of its three focus areas. A team from UBS Warburg LLC is among those hired.

KBC Aim, the hedge fund manager, has launched a new convertibles arbitrage fund following the resounding success of its initial fund. KBC Aim's first Convertible Opportunities Fund was launched in July 2001, and by January it had returned 9.5% and increased in size from $50m to $500m. This compares with an average return of 14.5% for convertible arbitrage funds for the whole of 2001.

Brazil ABN Amro has been mandated to arrange and underwrite a $380m export credit facility for Compania Votorantim de Celulose e Papel. The three year loan is secured on the borrower's pulp and paper exports.

Marrionnaud Parfumeries, the French perfumes retailer, continued the run of French issuers in the European convertible bond market when it completed a Eu150m offering this week. French issuers have dominated a slow start to the year for the equity-linked market - of the five issues this year three have come from France. But the response from investors to Marrionnaud's issue was subdued.

This eMAXX table lists the leading fixed income fund managers based in western Europe.

Certain members of the dealing community have been plotting the conception of the next trading team extraordinaire. Dresdner's Henry Nevstad and JPMorgan's Alex Haidas got together last week to introduce their respective offspring to each other. They are are on friendly terms already apparently, despite Ida, Henry's daughter, being more than 16 times the age of Alex's week-old son. Leak thinks it all sounds a bit potty, and Gavin Eddy, UBS Warburg's MTN whizz-kid, will be finding the prospect of losing his baby-face status most unnappy-tizing. Alisdair McDougall, Abbey National's capital markets boss, left work behind this week to go skiing and prove issuers know how to have fun too. But with Commerzbank's Gayle Turner returning from her skiing experience without her voice, Alisdair will be wondering what he has to do to compete. Leak suggests drinking lots of brandy. The market's most enthusiastic drinkers, the Islandsbanki crowd, have sent out their Thorrablot 2 invitations. The title 'Get into the spirit' was accompanied by a caricature of a dancing Viking (did Bill Symington pose for that?), and no doubt that is what Ingvar Ragnarsson plans us all to look like by the end of the evening. Keep February 20 free... and February 21 for that matter.

Abu Dhabi The general syndication of the $1.6bn Shuweihat independent water and power project (IWPP) project financing is progressing well.

Merrill Lynch this week launched 13 new exchange traded funds (ETFs) that will track the FTSE Global Sector indices on the Deutsche Börse. The funds are the latest addition to a rapidly growing sector. Manooj Mistry, the ETF product manager at Merrill Lynch, explained that the funds were still a relatively new concept in Europe but that much was expected from the product. "Merrill Lynch first came to the European market two years ago with Stoxx 50 and EuroStoxx 50 trackers," said Mistry. "These two are now traded on six exchanges and there are almost 80 or 90 ETFs available in Europe amounting to nearly Eu6bn under management."

* Corporate bond trading site Coredeal MTS has beefed up its management board with the appointment of economist Lord David Currie as chairman and Angelo Proni as chief executive. "Coredeal MTS represents a very exciting business proposition creating a liquid trading vehicle for corporate debt in Europe, building on the success of MTS in the government bond market in the eurozone," said Currie, dean of the City University Business School.