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Chile Lead arrangers Banco Santander, Dresdner Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland are finalising the term sheet for the $200m debt financing of the El Tesoro copper mine project. Syndication will be launched in August.

THE MALAYSIAN government's plan to provide Asia with a critical new bond market benchmark received a temporary blow yesterday (Thursday) after Moody's rating action against Japan spelt new trouble for Asian spreads. Malaysia decided to wait in the hope of improved market conditions in September, after Asian spreads widened by an average of around 25bp over the the day.

* Turkey's Akbank launched what is believed to be the first securitisation of American Express vouchers last Friday, with a $250m deal lead managed by Credit Suisse First Boston. The future flow deal parcelled Europay, MasterCard and Visa receivables along with payments from Amex, with which Akbank has an exclusive relationship in Turkey.

STERLING investors had their first chance to buy a securitisation of UK local authority obligations this week, as Paribas brought an £88m deal to refinance construction of a waste-to-energy plant in Birmingham.The transaction raised 20 year funds for Tyseley Waste Disposal Ltd, a project company which has a 25 year contract from Birmingham City Council to burn all its municipal rubbish.Tyseley Waste Disposal is owned by Onyx Environmental Management, one of the leading waste service providers to UK local authorities, which is an indirect but wholly owned subsidiary of French utilities giant Vivendi.The concession was signed in 1994, before the UK's private finance initiative (PFI) got underway, but formed part of the Conservative government's push to encourage local authorities to subcontract services to private sector companies.Hundreds of such deals were signed, but the Birmingham waste contract was unusual in that it involved construction of a new plant, creating a hefty demand for finance.Securitisation has been used for several project financings under the PFI including roads and hospitals, but this is the first deal where the obligor is a municipality, and could lead the way for other local authority concessionaires to borrow in the capital markets."Local authorities are the last frontier for the PFI, and this bond creates a template that the markets are happy with. It will probably be the first of many from the sector," said Lee Rochford, head

DEUTSCHE Bank and Banco Cisf brought the first securitisation of Portuguese assets to the bond market this week, as Banco Comercial Português parcelled over 33,000 consumer loans into DM435.1m of floating rate notes. "Our BIS ratio is 11%, so we are not under any capital pressure, but the deal will improve our return on equity," said Nuno Alves, senior manager at Banco Cisf, BCP's investment banking subsidiary.

Why is it when a hedge fund shorts stock its risk-adjusted performance includes its shorting activity, but when a pension fund lends a security its risk-adjusted performance typically does not include its securities lending activity?

JUMPING ahead of other Asian sovereign borrowers for the second time this year, the Philippines is set to return to the international debt markets by the beginning of next month with a fourth Libor/T-Bill pass-through note. The return of the sovereign via its issuing conduit, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), has been prompted by the impending maturity of its first innovative Libor/T-Bill note on August 14.

THE KOREA Asset Management Corporation (Kamco) has been forced to compress its 1998 borrowing programme into two jumbo issues in order to meet its government targets for the purchase of non performing loans (NPLs) in the Korean banking system. Officials said that despite the last minute postponement of its DM1bn euro-fungible deal last week, the corporation intends to re-activate the transaction as soon as secondary market spreads on the Republic of Korea's 2003 issue re-gain reasonable levels. "We are targeting a spread of less than 400bp and continue to watch the movement of the RoK 2003 bond," said one official. "We are ready to hit the market at any moment and are hoping that the right time will be the beginning of September."

* The Indian government is making moves to open up its domestic bond market to supranational issuance in a bid to improve infrastructure financing in the country. But, bankers still see enormous hurdles in developing market infrastructure. In the shorter term triple-A rated credits are likely to shy away in the face of US-led sanctions imposed after India's nuclear testing programme. Finance officials said that the idea of allowing multilateral agencies to float rupee-denominated bonds to fund infrastructure development had been developed in recent meetings with HSBC, which has done the lion's share of the work of developing Hong Kong's highly active Hong Kong dollar market.

NTT DoCoMo, the cellular phone subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp, could raise up to ¥19.5bn from a partial listing on the first section of the Tokyo stock exchange. The deal (which has Nikko Securities and Goldman Sachs as joint lead managers) could list as early as October. But analysts unconnected to the float said while the company has never been in better health and would be an undoubted success on listing, one major obstacle remains in the way of the float. The government may want to sell down some of its NTT shares around the same time and that trade would likely get priority. Proceeds from the sale of a fourth tranche of NTT have already been factored into the 1998 fiscal budget.

* Rana Kapoor, managing director and head of investment banking for Rabo India Finance, and three other partners have entered a joint venture agreement with Rabobank. The business will be a full service operation focusing on both domestic and international debt capital markets, M&A, private equity, food, agriculture and healthcare financing, project and structured finance, corporate banking and asset financing.