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Bank für Arbeit und Wirtschaft (BAWAG), the Austrian retail bank and securities house, has mandated Bayerische Landesbank to arrange a Eu3bn Euro-MTN programme. The inaugural issue is expected to be a euro and should emerge in May. The bank has previously been a frequent domestic issuer of plain vanilla and structured bonds and is active in the private placement market. However, the bank launched three Deutschmark transactions between 1996 and 1997.

Barclays Bank is planning to raise up to Eu1bn of tier 1 capital as early as next week through a self-led offering of reserve capital instruments (RCIs), a new product which could establish a blueprint for tier 1 issuance in Europe. The UK bank, which has been working on the transaction for the past 12 months, hopes to obtain a pricing advantage because of the benefits that investors gain from innovative structural features of the deal.

BIOTECH issues took a battering this week as investors shunned the sector along with technology stocks. The change in sentiment saw Cambridge Antibody Technology raise £10m less than expected and delayed the pricing of TransGene although Actelion successfully completed its deal. Credit Suisse First Boston priced Actelion's IPO toward the top of the range, raising Sfr234m. The deal was 20 times oversubscribed but bankers were eager not to price at the top in order to placate a difficult market.

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.