Rachel Evans
Asia editor
"We're all stretched. New products are still springing up and we're afraid of litigation from old deals." In-house counsel in Asia are worried. Fears of a backlash against structured finance dominate conversation.
Lehman Brothers' collapse made extra regulation inevitable. In Hong Kong, the monetary authority (HKMA) has received 19,699 complaints about Lehman minibonds (as of December 24 2008), over 200 of which have been referred to the SFC for investigation. Regulators need to show that they are protecting investors. And rightly or wrongly this will have an impact on counsel.
No one thinks the banks that created these products are primarily responsible for investors' lack of knowledge about structured products. That's the lead result of IFLR's annual poll of Asian bankers' counsel. Instead, the biggest portion of respondents (45%) believes the blame unquestionably lies with distributors – local and international banks such as ABN Amro, ICBC...