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Minter Ellison is advising the Australian-led consortium that has won a contract worth up to $14 billion to supply liquefied natural gas to the Guangdong LNG Project in southern China. The decision to award the contract to the North West Shelf Venture – which comprises Woodside Energy, BHP Billiton, BP, ChevronTexaco, Shell and Japan Australia LNG – creates Australia's largest-ever single export deal.

Japan's financial payment and settlement systems are to be strengthened as part of a review by a new committee set up to minimize operational risks in the country's financial markets. The initiative, spearheaded by the Financial Services Agency and agreed by the Financial System Council, will involve senior Japanese officials and academics looking at ways to create a safety net for the payment and settlement systems.

Ben Maiden reports from New York on whether foreign issuers will still flock to the US

After the completion of the negotiations for the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), the Mexican authorities started to negotiate international treaties around the world to avoid double taxation, as well as treaties for the exchange of tax information. Under the constitutional principles, these treaties when ratified and approved by the Mexican senate will become the highest laws of the land, together with the Mexican Constitution.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nick Ferguson reports on the strategies followed by international firms in Singapore since the country’s joint venture experiment hit trouble

The Securities Settlement System Reform Law will come into effect in Japan in early January 2003. The object of the law is to provide a uniform, safe and efficient book-entry settlement system for certain corporate, government, municipal and foreign bonds, commercial paper and beneficial interests. Shares, warrants and convertible bonds are outside the scope of the new system. A unified settlement system for all securities remains a goal for the future.