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More complex securitization structures have less chance of protecting investors from losses should the originator go bankrupt, a new survey reveals.

Some recent case law gives cause for concern regarding the tax deductibility in Belgium of expenses relating to put or call options on shares. This article will first briefly discuss the applicable principles and provisions as well as the case law. Subsequently, it will establish that the legal grounds of this case law are contestable and that it appears possible to circumvent this case law easily, so that expenses' relation to options on shares should still be tax deductible in Belgium. This article will not discuss the particular cases in which there can arise, in Belgium, such expenses with respect to options on shares.

The public offering of securities in the Czech Republic is regulated by Act No 591/1992 Coll on Securities (the Securities Act). The most recent amendments to the Securities Act include provisions intended to harmonize the legal framework for the regulation of the Czech capital market with EU law in anticipation of the accession of the Czech Republic into the EU in 2004.

After months of corporate scandals over accounting irregularities, international and US standards-setters have begun a process to harmonize their rules and create a single global standard by 2005.

The State Development Planning Commission issued the Provisional Regulations on Administration of Foreign Investment in the Rare Earth Industry on August 1 2002. According to this regulation, foreign-invested rare earth projects are divided into three main categories, that is, rare earth mining, rare earth smelting and separation, and rare earth deep processing and application.

Linklaters has advised a consortium of private equity houses on Europe's most expensive leveraged buyout. The €4.9 billion ($4.78 billion) acquisition of Legrand is the biggest private equity buyout for a decade, will be the largest mezzanine financing in Europe and the biggest high-yield financing in France.

Howard Trust has resigned as group general counsel and group secretary of Barclays, forcing the bank to find a replacement before he leaves in the first quarter of 2003. Trust became Barclays' first general counsel in 1995 after joining six years earlier, but has decided he wants to pursue new opportunities.

The European Investment Bank (EIB) has split its legal department into three parts as the institution looks to improve its internal coordination. The move comes as Eberhard Uhlmann, general counsel of the EIB's legal affairs directorate, assumes added responsibilities after also being appointed as secretary general of the bank.

Dechert has opened a full-service office in Frankfurt, Germany, run by the former managing partner of Simmons & Simmons' German operations. Corporate finance specialist Gerhard Kaiser has become the new managing partner of Dechert in Germany. He will start in his new role by building the firm's German-law focus on private equity, corporate recovery, taxation and investment management work, with an aim to have 12 lawyers on the ground by the end of this year.

Share repurchasing has been employed as an instrument of financial policy by German stock corporations since a reform of the German Stock Corporation Act in 1998. It essentially requires the shareholders' meeting to authorize the management board to repurchase shares up to a total volume of 10% of the share capital for a period of 18 months. Furthermore, the shareholders' meeting fixes the highest and lowest price for the shares to be acquired but it is at liberty not to specify the purpose of the share repurchase. The share repurchase can serve various objectives: procurement of shares as acquisition currency, distribution of excess liquidity with unchanged dividend level, increase of income per individual share and, not least, giving positive signals to the capital markets.