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Consistent with its plan to mold the Japanese Commercial Code to the needs of business, the Japanese government recently announced amendments to the laws on stock rights. From April 1 2002 two types of stock rights – detachable stock warrants and stock options – will be replaced by a new type of stock right: shinkabu-yoyakuken (abbreviated to yoyakuken), meaning literally "the reserved right to new shares".

With pressure mounting on offshore jurisdictions to tighten up their tax haven status and secrecy rules, lawyers are looking to adapt their legislative environments to encourage work in sophisticated cross-border transactions. Thomas Williams reports

The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority recently issued a draft prudential standard for Authorized Deposit-taking Institutions (ADIs), together with a draft guidance note. These measures aim to ensure that ADI outsourcing arrangements are subject to appropriate due diligence and continuous monitoring.

The Capital Market Board (CMB) is using its best efforts in order to ensure a transparent environment, enabling investors and publicly held companies to become part of a sound and prosperous market. As a result of these efforts it has promulgated several new communiqués.

"The legislative branch of the government is essentially saying that some of the agencies of the executive branch have fallen down on the job"

Simmons & Simmons is pitching for US securities work after netting its first US-qualified securities partner in the UK. Christopher Lewis, a senior associate in the New York office of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, has joined the firm's capital markets group.

Mayer Brown & Platt is expecting to scoop at least three new securitization deals after hiring Drew Salvest to strengthen its US-law capabilities.

In the first of a three-part series, Philip Gilligan and John Banks of Lovells, Hong Kong, examine the causes behind the boom in M&A activity in the Asian banking industry and explain how such deals can be structured

A recently completed study in Canada found that collars, which are used to stabilize a bidder's stock acquisition currency, have been used in approximately 2% of takeover bids for public companies over the past three years. Although the number of deals appears low, two of the five largest mergers and acquisitions (M&A) deals of 2000 in Canada employed collars. Both Vivendi's C$41.6 billion ($26.1 billion) acquisition of Seagram and Shire Pharmaceuticals Group's C$5.9 billion acquisition of BioChem Pharma utilized collar structures to increase certainty for their transactions.

Construction companies are often not used to dealing with special purpose companies (SPCs) on large infrastructure projects. When it comes to negotiating a contract on such a project, they need to ask the right questions to find out, among other things, about the commitments the SPC has obtained for required debt and equity. Robert Vitale of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, New York, answers the key questions