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Euroweek hears that Alan Tate is to leave Rabobank to join WestLB's London syndications team.

UK utility PowerGen highlighted the potential benefits of euro issuance for UK corporates this week when it successfully placed a Eu500m 10 year issue with European accounts, while funding itself inside the levels available in the sterling market. Many UK corporates have traditionally relied on their home market for funds, but dependence on the narrow market dominated by the powerful sterling investor base has pushed up funding costs for repeat borrowers.

CONVERTIBLE investors had a huge variety of new issues to choose from this week with deals from blue chip issuers, small cap groups, established emerging market names and sovereign borrowers. Traders say the convertible market will provide investors with all the paper they want in the next two months as issuers seek to execute their funding plans and vendors seek to use the current strong, if volatile, stockmarkets to raise cheap debt and monetise investments.

Norway Fees on offer for banks joining the Eu75m five year revolver for SpareBank1 Vest are 8bp for senior lead managers taking Eu7.5m, 6bp for lead managers taking Eu5m and 4bp for managers taking Eu2.5m.

Deutsche Bank is on the verge of launching its first leveraged, synthetic collateralised loan obligation, to reduce regulatory capital held against loans to high quality corporates in the US, UK and Canada. The deal will reference 330 assets on Deutsche's balance sheet, worth $5bn - the bank will transfer the most senior tranche of risk through a credit default swap, while another such swap lays off the junior element to a special purpose vehicle, Blue Stripe.

UK catalogue retailer Great Universal Stores this week executed a £380m auto loan securitisation, as the second stage of a plan foreshadowed in February 1998 when the company bought its rival Argos for £1.67bn. "We put in a £1.6bn short term facility to finance the acquisition, and it was always our intention to refinance it at longer maturities," said David Bury, group treasurer and commercial director of GUS in London. "We have now refinanced half of it, and are talking to both the major rating agencies about an unsecured rating, with a view to accessing the European or American bond markets."

UK centralised lender The Paragon Group of Companies, the most prolific asset backed issuer in Europe over the last 13 years, this week inaugurated a revamped securitisation programme, designed to enhance its appeal to investors and shake off the last vestiges of association with the underwriting and delinquency problems that dogged the company in the early 1990s housing recession. JP Morgan lead managed a £185m mortgage deal, Paragon Mortgages No 1 Plc, that introduces a new asset specific branding for Paragon's deals. For the last two years the company has securitised mortgages, car loans and consumer loans through its Finance for People programme.

Westdeutsche Landesbank last Friday underwrote a Eu194m securitisation of hard currency revenues for Türkiye Halk Bankasi, and has begun syndicating the deal in the loan market. "We considered the bond market, but there is a huge pipeline of Turkish securitisations, which banks are finding difficult to sell," said Ulrich Kastner, a transactor in WestLB's asset backed and principal finance group in London.

Cabot Financial (Europe) Ltd, the UK based company that buys distressed consumer debt, this week closed its sixth and largest acquisition of charged off credit card debt. CFE bought a portfolio with a face value of £50m from a UK bank that is a leading credit card originator. The deal takes the total face value of CFE's assets to £85m - and the company has also recently concluded its first long term purchase agreement, under which it commits to buy from another bank a given amount of charged off credit card debt every month for a year.

The European Investment Bank this week took part in a securitisation for only the second time, funding the senior tranche of a Eu232m deal for Banca Italease, the leasing bank owned by over 30 of Italy's banche popolari. Like Italease's three previous securitisations, Iris No 4 was arranged by Paribas and Finanziaria Internazionale, the bank's securitisation partner in Italy.

Structured finance boutique Fredell & Co this week unveiled a new securitisation programme that will provide finance for Swedish residential property companies. The programme will ultimately be financed in the term ABS markets, but while it builds up collateral for each deal, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce will provide senior finance through its D-1/P-1 rated conduit Great Lakes Funding Capital Corp, while Lehman Brothers warehouses the junior tranches.