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Merrill Lynch this week announced the hiring of TJ Lim as head of international debt markets, taking full advantage of the Deutsche/Dresdner merger debacle to boost its European and Pacific Rim operations. "He will join the firm as head of our international debt business, which is a newly created job," Kelly Martin, head of global debt markets at Merrill Lynch, told Euroweek. "It encompasses several regions and countries - the UK, continental Europe, Japan, Asia, Australasia and the global emerging business, which would also include parts of Latin America.

Bank One has hired Jim Irvine to build up an ABS investment business, as a managing director in its London securitisation group. Irvine is one of the best known and most experienced investors in European structured finance. In December he resigned as head of securitised markets in the group treasury at Halifax after a seven year career buying ABS and MBS for the UK bank.

You also heard the news just after midday on Wednesday - the Deutsche-Dresdner merger had been unceremoniously binned, taken to an unmarked outside dunny and flushed down the River Oder. "Good riddance" is our opinion because, as we have said in these columns before, this was a merger which should never have been allowed to happen. Rarely in more than 30 years have we seen two world ranking banks behave with such gross incompetence and total disregard for the interests of their shareholders and employees. The leaders of both banks destroyed shareholder value and the reputation of German banking for professionalism.

HSBC Bank Plc, the former Midland Bank, this week launched the first public securitisation to emerge from the giant HSBC Group, with a £519m collateralised loan obligation backed by its loans to UK corporates. The deal removes one of the most high profile names from the dwindling list of top commercial banks yet to adopt securitisation as a tool of balance sheet management. It also underlines the fact that changes in retail savings patterns are sharpening banks' enthusiasm for new sources of funds.

Morgan Stanley Dean Witter last Friday emerged victorious from an eight month battle against a consortium of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan to acquire the troubled Italian mortgage bank Credito Fondiario e Industriale SpA (Fonspa). The price Morgan Stanley will pay has not been disclosed, but the deal takes the US bank's commitment to the Italian non-performing loan and real estate markets to a new height.

Salomon Smith Barney has begun marketing a £750m mortgage securitisation for Bank of Scotland that will use a highly innovative structure incorporating US style master trust technology in a bid to achieve greater efficiency and tighter pricing. Mound Financing No 1 Plc will offer four senior tranches rated triple-A by Moody's and Standard & Poor's. The first three will be denominated in dollars, and will be soft bullets on the model of US credit card securities.