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The new presence of foreign law firms aggressively staking out territory in Germany is putting pressure on local firms. A second wave of mergers seems to be beginning. Samantha Wigham reports

It has generally been the practice of the Inland Revenue of Hong Kong to disallow payments made on the closure of a business as being non-deductible expenses for the purpose of a profits tax computation. The Hong Kong Court of Appeal recently examined this practice in the context of severance (ie redundancy) payments in The Commissioner of Inland Revenue v Cosmotron Manufacturing (Civil Appeal No. 75 of 1996).

The Law Reform Commission has announced a plan that will give financially distressed companies the chance of avoiding insolvency proceedings by providing the company with a court-sanctioned moratorium from creditors while a provisional supervisor takes control of the company to restructure its debt.

Media group United News & Media, recently merged with MAI, has bought conference organizer Blenheim Group. The offer is worth about £590 million (US$970 million).

The Danish securities market was reformed by the Danish parliament in December 1995. The Act on Securities Trade and the Act on Stockbroker Companies (together with amendments to the Banking Act and the Mortgage Credit Act) implemented the Investment Services Directive (93/22) and the Capital Adequacy Directive (93/6). The Act came into force in 1996 and the relevant executive orders under the Act have been issued, so that we also now have some impression of the first effects of the reform.

In early December, Ferrovias, the government agency in charge of the Colombian railway network, published the rules for railway concessions for the next 30 years. Concessions will be awarded for the modernization, maintenance, operation and exploitation of the railways.

US chocolate company Hershey has agreed to buy the North American confectionery business of Leaf Inc, the US subsidiary of Finland's Huhtamaki. The price is US$440 million plus annual licensing fees. Hershey has also agreed to sell Huhtamaki its two European operations, Germany's Gubor and Italy's Sperlari, for US$110 million.

South Africa's largest industrial company and one of the world's top five brewers, South African Breweries, made a US$362 million offering of ADSs into the US and internationally. The offering was conducted under Rule 144A and Regulation S. The lead managers were Robert Fleming and Cazenove & Co.

P&O, the UK shipping firm, is set to merge its ocean container business with that of Dutch counterpart Royal Nedlloyd. The merged entity, P&O Nedlloyd Container Line, requires EU regulatory clearance and will have assets of US$1.5 billion.

US firm Rogers & Wells has lost the head and 12 other members of its Latin American group, which specializes in cross-border work and project finance. The head of the group, Roberto Dañino, together with two other partners, Paul Dwyer and Jorge Alers, have left the firm for rival Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington DC. Dañino is a Peruvian lawyer and former general counsel of the Inter-American Investment Corporation. "We think that the market ahead of us is going to be dependent on DC-based mutilateral organizations such as OPIC and Eximbank and we had to be based in the headquarters of a top firm in the city," says Dañino.