Search results for

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.

Clifford Chance has advised France Telecom on the latest part of its disposal programme, which has seen the company selling its transmission tower business Télédiffusion de France (TDF) to a private equity consortium for €1.9 billion ($1.8 billion). Ashurst Morris Crisp advised the consortium, which consists of Charterhouse Development Capital, CDC Ixis Equity Capital and Caisse des Dépôts, the French bank. Clifford Chance advised France Telecom and White & Case and Linklaters advised the banks.

On May 21 2002 a new set of rules for standardized information disclosure was introduced by China's central bank the People's Bank of China (PBoC) to improve commercial banks' transparency. The introduction of the Commercial Banks Information Disclosure Tentative Procedures, which contain 31 articles in total and take effect immediately following promulgation, is seen as a further step taken by the PBoC in its effort to reform the banking sector and to reinforce market discipline for commercial banks, which are under enormous pressure from foreign competitors especially after China's entry into the WTO.

Proposed amendments to the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) corporate governance guidelines were recently published in response to the Saucier Report on corporate governance in Canada. Unlike the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the TSX does not have corporate governance listing standards. Instead, TSX companies are required to disclose their corporate governance system on an annual basis and, where the system differs from the TSX guidelines, to disclose the reasons for the difference.

The Australian Takeovers Panel recently declared a break fee to be unacceptable. The break fee was payable in shares, giving the offeror (Rexadis) the right to acquire a substantial interest in the target company (Ballarat Goldfields) if the shareholders rejected a proposal for Rexadis to buy assets of the company. The Rexadis proposal was one of three competing proposals for the future of Ballarat Goldfields. The Panel considered the break fee was likely to have a coercive effect on shareholders when considering the proposals. A rejection of the Rexadis proposal by shareholders could have diluted shareholdings. The Panel thought it was in the shareholders' best interests to be able to make an unfettered choice on the proposals.