Search results for

Rating: Aa3/AA-/AA-

A former Lehman Brothers managing director showed us an award for the firm's stellar performance in 2005. We told him not to bother, as it would be the first of many.

Have you ever dreamed about waking up and finding that you were suddenly the owner of your own private bank?

Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein announced this week that Henry Nevstad has become global head of credit flow products. He takes over from Sean Park who will only work on DrKW's digital markets initiative, of which he was named head at the launch in September 2005. Nevstad was previously global head of structured notes and private placements.

It is perhaps not surprising that the legal problems surrounding Deutsche Bank and Josef Ackermann hog some of the international press headlines, and we have seen some comments on Ackermann which are both amateurish and shallower than an April shower puddle. When we berate our German friends for being so wishy-washy, they try to be apologetic and say that Germany simply doesn't produce many excellent bankers.

DZ Bank has launched the inaugural trade off its recently established Eu1bn tier one capital issuing programme called DZ Bank Perpetual Funding Issuer (reported in EuroWeek 932).

Dubai Ports World launched and priced its convertible Islamic sukuk transaction yesterday (Thursday), and frenzied demand caused the bookrunners to increase the deal by 25% and revise the price.

Rating: Aa2/AA-/AA-

Cairo-based investment bank EFG-Hermes announced late last week that it had acquired a 20% stake in Lebanon's Banque Audi, one of the biggest foreign direct investments in the Middle East. EFG-Hermes is paying around $450m at $60 a share to capture 7.5m of the 10m Banque Audi common shares issued to support its cross-border growth.

With the oil price surging and interest rates climbing, conditions looked difficult for fixed income markets in 2005. Then Standard & Poor's fired both barrels at the bond market, downgrading Ford and General Motors to junk. Participants were afraid the credit market would crumble, but as Toby Fildes and Jon Hay report, the shock was a salutary experience and the market can look back on a successful year. With M&A coming back and the corporate sector releveraging, there should be plenty of action to look forward to in 2006.

Despite initial fears last week that the dollar market was not quite suitable for supranational, sovereign and agency issuers yet this year, borrowers came out in force this week, proving doubters wrong.

In December, EuroWeek asked the emerging markets teams at the leading banks in the international bond markets for their views on which deals had been the best, or worst, of 2005.