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Isil Ökten Aslihan Özbey Akbank TAS has established a covered bond programme in an aggregate principal amount of up to €1 billion ($1.1 billion), which is the first ever mortgage-backed bond programme in Turkey. The first mortgage covered bond programme in Turkey was established on December 23 2014 on the approval of the base prospectus by the Central Bank of Ireland, after a challenging process. This programme comes after many years of hard work by the legislator, the issuers and the arrangers. Numerous changes have been made to the legislation to enable the first issue, and it would still benefit from further clarifications.

The FSB’s total loss-absorbing capacity rules are still in their infancy, but market participants are worried

New rules that expand the Foreign Investment Review Board's approval of investments in agriculture follow growing concern that the sector needs more protection

Three partners at leading French law firms explain how the Euro PP templates will facilitate financing for mid-size companies

Simmons & Simmons partners Charlotte Stalin and Penny Miller explain the key regulatory themes for the year ahead

Contributors including Korea Corporate Governance Service, NYSE and Gen2 Partners provide practical advice for managing transactions in the country

Besnik Duraj For more than two decades, the Albanian electricity power sector has been facing critical financial and operational problems, as a result of a number of issues and ensuing chain reactions. The most characteristic example is end consumers who do not pay the power distributors, who in turn do not pay the transmission operators, and so forth up to the power producing companies. With the entire electricity power system in a debt downward spiral, a major objective of the Albanian Government for 2015 is the reformation of the power sector by drafting a new bill. The new draft bill was approved during the Council of Ministers meeting on January 14 2015 and sent to the Parliament for debate and approval. Apart from financial goals, the said bill aims at fulfilling Albania's obligations in the context of the Energy Community Treaty. It seeks to harmonise the local power sector legislation with EU directives and rules, with a particular focus on the Third Energy Package for gas and electricity markets.

Elias Neocleous Since the beginning of 2014, the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC) has been developing a risk-based supervision framework. By focusing on the entities and activities that are of greatest importance in terms of their potential impact, it aims to increase the effectiveness of its regulatory activities. Consequently, CySEC's assessment of the risk that each individual entity it regulates poses will determine the intensity of supervision. A risk assessment will be performed for all entities at least every year and the outcome will be used to define each entity's monitoring programme for the forthcoming regulatory period. The assessment will be based on the impact, or potential harm that could be caused by a particular set of circumstances, weighted by the estimated probability of those circumstances actually occurring. Risk measures may be quantitative or qualitative. Impact is assessed on the basis of numerical and financial data extracted from the entity's regulatory returns. Probability is assessed on a range of criteria including the entity's governance arrangements and its susceptibility to being used for financial crime.

Oene Marseille Emir Nurmansyah Indonesia's Ministry of Trade has issued a regulation requiring the use of a letter of credit (LC) for the export of certain commodities. Under the new regulation, payments for export of crude palm oil, coals, oil and gas, and certain minerals including steel, gold, and nickel are to be done by way of an LC. Payments from export of manufactured goods are exempted from the regulation. The regulation also mandates that the payment price stated in the LC should not be lower than the world market price of the exported goods. Further, the paying bank in this process is required to be a qualified domestic bank (Bank Devisa di dalam negeri). LC payment performed by a foreign branch of an Indonesian-headquartered bank is disallowed.

John Breslin Callaghan Kennedy The Irish parliament is considering draft legislation to regulate the activity of loan portfolio servicing – the Consumer Protection (Regulation of Credit Servicing Firms) Bill 2015. The Bill has the sensible policy aim of ensuring that relevant Irish borrowers (natural persons and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) retain the protections they have under Irish law if their loans are sold by Irish-authorised credit providers to unregulated purchasers.