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European lawmakers want to establish a registration scheme for rating agencies such as Moody's and Standard & Poor's.

The Italian cabinet has approved a draft law that will tighten oversight of Italy's financial markets, but has stopped short of endorsing the sweeping reforms proposed to help prevent a repeat of the collapse of dairy foods company Parmalat.

Aendments to Russia's competition law will free small companies from state control but increase scrutiny of the country's oligarchs.

US banks and lawyers face confusion about the tests used to determine their liability on securities fraud. Ben Maiden reports from New York

Michael Evans surveys the approach to legal staffing among some of Europe's biggest companies

Continuing their challenge to the ratable-payment interpretation of pari passu clauses in cross-border debt, Lee C Buchheit and Jeremiah S Pam trace the evolution of the clause to find out what it truly means

Simon Crompton analyzes the performances of the best securitization practices in last year's growing structured finance market

In January 2004 the Russian government issued a number of regulations clarifying the application of certain tax exemptions under the Production Sharing Agreements (PSA) regime. In particular, the government approved the list of documents that a PSA investor is required to file with the customs office in order to obtain customs exemptions and with the tax authorities to obtain property and transport tax exemptions. Although these exemptions originally provided for in Charter 26(4) of the Tax Code, their practical implementation to date was not possible as it was contingent upon further regulatory acts of the government.

The long-awaited new Bankruptcy Act was approved by the Finnish parliament on February 4 2004 and is expected to become effective over the next six months. The present Bankruptcy Act dates back to 1868 and has become outdated and - because of several partial amendments - difficult to understand. The purpose of the new Act is to enact a regulatory framework that is clear and foreseeable, enabling efficient and transparent bankruptcy proceedings.

Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan: a deal three years in the making The financing of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, one of the largest pipeline projects in history, has closed after years of controversy.