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Dollar swap spreads meandered within a tight range this week. At the close yesterday (Thursday), the 10 year mid-market was 95bp over the new 5% cash bond due February 2011, while five year swaps were at 83bp over the re-opened 5.75% Treasury due November 2005. These prices are little changed from a week ago. While swap spreads have not changed course substantially over the last week, the swap curve has steepened appreciably. At yesterday's close, the two year swap was bid at 5.21%, while the 10 year swap was bid at 6.09%. Only 24 hours previously this curve had been 77bp, so it steepened by almost 10bp in one day. At the beginning of the week, after the long weekend, the curve was 72bp, and it was around 69bp/70bp at the end of last week.

Deutsche Bank and RBS are underwriting and arranging the financing to back UK power company Innogy Holding’s acquisition of Yorkshire Power Group Limited.

Deutsche Bank and RBS are underwriting and arranging the financing to back UK power company Innogy Holding’s acquisition of Yorkshire Power Group Limited.

Deutsche Bank managers this week received two internal memos, one from Rolf-E Breuer, and one from Josef Ackermann and Carl von Boehm-Bezing. They detail Deutsche’s ambitions for its newly restructured corporate and investment bank (CIB), headed by Ackermann and von Boehm-Bezing, and clarify management responsibilities.

Deutsche Bank has appointed Goldman Sachs banker Lee Zhang to head its Greater China team in global investment banking.

Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein has continued to expand its global debt team in North America with five senior appointments to its New York office.

Piraeus Bank, which has been expected to make an entrance into the Euro-MTN market since the beginning of 2001, has announced the dealer panel off its forthcoming euro1 billion ($909.44 million) MTN programme. The dealers off the programme are BNP Paribas, Credit Suisse First Boston, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Salomon Smith Barney, UBS Warburg and the issuer itself. UBS Warburg is also the arranger. The bank is the fifth Greek borrower to join the market. And following Greece's advance into the Eurozone earlier this year, market players believe there will be many more signings to come. National Bank of Greece joined the market in October 2000 and Stratos Chatzigiannis, head of capital markets at the bank, thinks that the Eurozone has made funding a lot cheaper for Greek issuers. He told MTNWeek in January: "Being part of the Eurozone and having the euro as our currency has driven spreads down. We've already seen this in the public debt markets. Previously levels were being posted at Euribor+15 or +20. Now it's Euribor flat." (See MTNWeek issue 214)

Electrolux will this week join Securitas in hoping to benefit from buoyant demand for strong triple-B credits offering diversification opportunities, when it launches a seven year euro transaction via ABN Amro and Goldman Sachs.

Government issuers have belatedly woken up to the threat posed by the grandfathering of bond issues under the European Union's proposed savings tax directive, with EU national treasuries this week appearing to win special treatment for their debt management programmes in the crucial area of fungibility. Under the agreement reached by EU member states last year, which replaced the proposed introduction of a common EU withholding tax with the principle of exchange of information on a reciprocal basis, bonds issued before March 1, 2001 are exempt from the directive's information collection or withholding tax provisions.

Brazil * Companhia Energetica de São Paulo - CESP

* Artesia Overseas Ltd Guarantor: Artesia Banking Corp

Azerbaijan The International Bank of Azerbaijan (IBA) has mandated RZB to arrange an $8m short term loan.