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Macquarie Corporate Finance USA, a New York-based division of Australia's Macquarie Bank, is seeking to acquire several U.S. electric transmission grids and will securitize these assets to finance the acquisitions. Tom Capasse, division director in the New York unit, declined to specify what companies will be acquired. Steve Fetter, the head of Fitch's global power group, says the purchase of transmission grid assets through securitization has never been done before.

Market sources say $600 million in commitments has come in on BNP Paribas' credit for Zurich Capital Markets, including $200 commitments from Lloyds and Deutsche Bank, after the firm offered richer up-front fees this time around. Bankers said BNP Paribas has doubled the up-front fees it offered last year when it pitched the company's one-year commercial paper backstop to banks. The bank is offering three basis points for commitments up to $200 million, two basis points for commitments up to $100 million, and one basis point for commitments up to $50 million on the new credit. Pricing on the investment grade credit is similar to the last deal at LIBOR plus 22.5 basis points.

BNP Paribas has wrapped up its $150 million revolver for Smart & Final after the company required an extension on the old facilities while it waited on documentation for the replacement. The deal was launched on Oct. 22 in Los Angeles and was completed last week, said a banker familiar with the credit. The new revolver replaces a $150 million, three-year credit led by Credit Lyonnais and NationsBank.

The £2 billion sale lease back deal of 6,700 properties owned by British Telecommunications, which has been delayed since September, will kick off next week with a roadshow, according to an official at Schroder Salomon Smith Barney, which is underwriting the deal. The deal, dubbed Telereal, should be one of the largest deals out of the U.K. this year. It had been delayed because of the massive amount of legal work involved in securitizing so many properties. British land property firms Land Securities Trillium and William Pears, will fund roughly £1.8 billion of the purchase with an offering of asset-backed bonds. The final structure of the deal has not been set and the offering circular is scheduled to appear this week. The SSSB official said the deal will have tranches ranging from triple-A to triple-B, but couldn't comment on price talk.

Busysiders looking at the "B" tranche of UBS Warburg's $190 million bank deal backing Investcorp's acquisition of Neptune Technology Group from Schlumberger last week said they are expecting a price flex on the deal. Investors compared the deal to the recently twice oversubscribed J.P. Morgan deal for Compass Minerals, which offered investors a $225 million term loan "B" at a spread of LIBOR plus 3 1/2% as part of a structure including a $250 million bond deal. "This is an all-senior deal offering the same spread as Compass," lamented one buysider who passed on the deal. She explained the credit was a roughly 4X all-senior deal, leaving investors uncomfortable without any subordinated cushion. "The leverage is just way too high and the deal too small," she added.

Wachovia Securities and UBS Warburg are delaying the launch of a credit on behalf of US Oncology, a cancer research concern, until mid-December. The deal was supposed to hit the market this month, but has been postponed due to the holidays, said Bruce Broussard, cfo of US Oncology. "We felt with the holidays and outstanding structural requirements we needed to get done we would move it until after the holidays," he said. As it is structured now, the deal consists of a $100 million revolver and a $75 million asset-sale bridge facility. Wachovia and UBS Warburg are also supposed to lead a follow-on bond deal sometime next year. The size of the bond deal could not be determined by press time. Broussard did not return repeated calls further inquiring about possible structural changes to the deal. Price talk on the deal was unavailable, but sources noted that leverage on the deal is supposed to be less than two times.

PTT, Thailand's largest oil firm, has raised $726m in its forthcoming IPO on the Stock Exchange of Thailand, giving a boost to prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra's ambitious plans for a slew of government sell-offs in coming years to help fund the budget deficit and reinvigorate the country's stock market. In total 920m shares were sold at Bt35 each, the top end of the Bt30-Bt35 price range. The transaction secured a total of Bt32.2bn, making the deal the second largest IPO in non-Japan Asia this year.

Singapore Mass Rapid Transport (SMRT) Corp, the majority state owned operator of Singapore's railways, has followed Singapore Airlines to launch its own debut in the bond market. The S$500m two tranche issue had a good response from the domestic investor base, whose appetite was not fully sated by the previous transaction from Singapore Airlines (SIA).

Goldman Sachs won the auction to sell a block of 20m TSMC shares this week, but bankers in Hong Kong suggested that the winning bid may have become a burden for the firm. Goldman beat five other banks on Monday, and bought the deal at $16.05 per American Depository Receipt (ADR). The stock closed at $15.51 on Tuesday trading in New York and $15.80 on Wednesday. Competition to win business related to TSMC stock has been intense in recent years. It became known last week that Taiwan's National Development Fund was thinking about selling the block and sentiment towards the stock was strong over that period.

Australia Radiology and pathology group Sonic Healthcare sold A$170.1m of new shares this week to fund expansion. Sonic was able to cash in on the strong demand for medical technology stocks and the excellent performance of newly-listed Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, which is now trading on Nasdaq and the New Zealand bourse.

Australian non-bank mortgage lender RAMS Home Loans Pty Ltd will price an A$900m domestic securitisation on Tuesday next week, which it believes will prove more efficient than a cross-currency deal. Unusually, RAMS Mortgage Corp (RMC) Series 11 will be lead managed by JP Morgan, with Salomon Smith Barney as co-manager. JP Morgan has always played a leading role in the international market for Australian MBS, but never had a significant presence in the domestic market. The merger with Chase has given it a deeper fixed income franchise in Australia.

ING Barings has structured a $450m synthetic collateralised debt obligation for OUB Asset Management, the subsidiary of Singapore's Overseas Union Bank and Asia's most experienced arbitrage CDO manager. According to Moody's, the deal is the first synthetic arbitrage CDO for an Asian manager.