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The rally at the long end of the Treasury market and a deterioration in investors' opinion of Venezuela forced PDVSA, the country's oil company, to drop the 30 year tranche of a planned $800m global deal this week and price only a $500m 10 year offering of paper backed by oil receivables. The deal, led by Credit Suisse First Boston and Goldman Sachs, was issued through the PDVSA Finance vehicle the oil concern set up some years ago to issue bonds with investment grade ratings achieved through support from dollar denominated oil receivables.

* HVB Real Estate Bank Rating: Aaa/AAA

* European Investment Bank Rating: Aaa/AAA

Rentokil Initial (Rentokil), the hygiene and pest control company, is set to sign a euro2.5 billion ($2.24 billion) Euro-MTN facility next week. HSBC has scooped the arrangership. Roger Payne, finance director at Rentokil, explains the reasons for setting up the programme. He says: "We signed the programme as we wished to rearrange our current financing facilities in a combination of the short, medium and long term. We have been looking at the capital markets for several years and we felt that now was a good opportunity to rearrange our finances. We only recently got our BBB+ long-term rating from Standard & Poor's. This is especially pleasing as it was assigned post-September 11 so has even greater weight." The first decision for Payne was to get together the programme's dealer panel. He says: "We chose the banks on our dealer panel partly on a beauty parade basis and partly due to our existing banking relationships with them. They all had to have competence in the MTN market but it is also part of the culture at Rentokil that we have a preference of doing business with existing suppliers." The programme has already been on a roadshow in the UK and the debut trade was a seven-year £

The round of rate cuts in the US, Europe and the UK this week provided markets with a much needed boost, sending government bonds in all three regions lower and encouraging issuers to revive borrowing plans to lock into the low rates available. The Eurodollar market was dominated by a $1bn five year inaugural dollar bond from CDC IXIS and the success of the issue is expected to prompt further highly rated issuance.

Rosy Blue NV, a privately owned diamond wholesale company in Belgium that is one of the biggest buyers of rough diamonds from DeBeers, this week launched its long awaited securitisation backed by its stock of diamonds. Lead managed by Nomura, pre-marketing started last July, but was hit by a number of delays.

With a new loan for Gazprom, a debt package for Golden Telecom and a pipeline stuffed with bonds, Russian corporates are taking the capital markets by storm. Four banks are close to winning the mandate for a $200m five year debt facility for Russian heavyweight Gazprom.

Finland Syndication of the Eu100m five year deal for KCI Konecranes has been closed. The five year multi-currency revolver pays a margin of 60bp over Euribor.

Sony Global Treasury Services has signed a $7 billion global CP programme. Goldman Sachs is the arranger. The Euro-CP dealers are the arranger, Barclays Capital, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan and UBS Warburg. The US CP dealers are the arranger, Credit Suisse First Boston, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley.

* Bank Austria AG Guarantor: City of Vienna

Standard & Poor's (S&P) last Friday (November 2) upgraded Railtrack plc's corporate and senior unsecured ratings to BB+, a move that some observers considered a U-turn. The agency had lowered the ratings from A to CC and C, respectively, on October 9, two days after the UK government put Railtrack, which owns the national railway infrastructure, into administration.

Nasdaq, the major growth exchange in the US, announced yesterday evening (Thursday) that it wants an outright merger with one of the big European exchanges, in a move that could settle the battle for European exchange dominance. Nasdaq's move follows a turbulent time for the European exchanges. Last week saw the conclusion of the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (Liffe) sale, with Euronext emerging the winner. This has left the London Stock Exchange (LSE) out in the cold and looking for a new partner.