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Renault was a casualty of poor Japanese investor sentiment this week, when the French auto manufacturer was forced to postpone its second Samurai bond issue. Joint lead managers Daiwa SMBC and Merrill Lynch were due to launch the ¥35bn five year deal on Wednesday, but the collapse into bankruptcy of Enron and Kmart has severely affected Japanese investors' appetite for offshore corporate paper.

Royal Bank of Scotland Financial Markets is beefing up its UK corporate origination team in the expectation of another bumper year of fixed income issuance. The bank has recruited senior originator Russell Maybury as a managing director, UK corporates. He joins next week from UBS Warburg, where he was most recently executive director, UK debt capital markets.

EuroWeek conducted a straw poll this week of emerging markets sovereign credit strategists at eight investment banks, to discover their views of where the markets are headed in the coming year. Here are the results.

Finland The syndication of the Eu110m loan facility for Perlos has been closed by arranger Sampo Bank.

Carlos Conde, the former co-head of pan-European equity capital markets at JP Morgan, has re-emerged at SG. Conde will be sole head within the French firm. He started work on Tuesday and reports to Stephen Brisby and Marc Litzler, who co-head the global investment banking division with Kim Fennebresque.

* World Bank Rating: Aaa/AAA/AAA

In a surprise move to generate forex inflows, South Africa has tapped the market for $250m via Morgan Stanley. The tap of the 9.125% 2009 bond was a private placement to two institutional accounts, one US and one non-US. The South African finance ministry said that proceeds of the bond would be used to reduce the country's net open forex position (NOFP). The deal was certainly unnecessary from a funding perspective. South Africa had already overrun its $1bn issuance target for the financial year to March 2002 by $170m thanks to a ¥30bn private placement last autumn.

With the merger of the Spanish stock exchanges less than a month away from completion, speculation over the impact of the newly formed entity on the European stock exchange landscape has started in earnest. Some analysts have dismissed the new entity as merely a latecomer to the well established set-up, while others are not as keen to ignore an exchange which, according to a recent press release, has established itself as the fourth largest in Europe in terms of trading volumes.

* Allstate Life Funding LLC Rating: Aa2

* Bank of Scotland Treasury Services plc Guarantor: Bank of Scotland

Technip-Coflexip, the French oil and gas engineering company, took advantage of the seemingly bottomless pockets of equity-linked investors when it completed a Eu793.5m convertible issue this week. Issuers have been quick to take advantage of a market that saw such success in 2001, but according to Andrew Cooke, a managing director in charge of outright convertible funds at CBI-UBP International, the issues in the first month of 2002 have differed in one key respect. Cooke argues that issuers have woken up to the fact that they are able to protect their share price by pricing a deal with enough left on the table for outright investors.