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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

Brazil’s new law adapts the instrument to local financing needs, but reveals the challenges of making covered bonds work in emerging markets

Local corporates need new financing options. If international debt capital markets are to be a solution, some long-proposed reforms must reach fruition

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.

Oscar Samour Last year, the Salvadoran Congress passed the Investment Funds Law (IFL), which established the possibility of channelling and developing collective investment within the local financial system. As defined in the IFL, an investment fund is a special-purpose vehicle that gathers contributions – generally in cash – from multiple investors to be invested in different types of assets, such as securities, real estate, and financial instruments. Under the IFL, investment funds are administered by a special-purpose stock company (sociedad anónima) called a management company. The management company is created with the sole purpose of investing the contributions from its stockholders – investors – in accordance with its bylaws. The patrimony of the fund is independent from the patrimony of the management company by law, and the contributions from the investors are therefore protected in case of bankruptcy of the management company. Additionally, management companies must design and establish mechanisms for asset and share valuations, and have the proper accounting and operation records as well as a merchandising platform for promoting investment.

Alexei Bonamin The Brazilian mutual fund industry, the sixth largest in the world, has been primarily regulated by Instruction 409 from the Brazilian Securities Commission (Comissão de Valores Mobiliários – CVM) for the past 10 years. On July 1 2015, this will be revoked and replaced by Instruction 555, issued by the CVM on December 17 2014, which will then govern the incorporation, management, functioning and disclosure of information of mutual funds.

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.

Mauritius has throughout the last two decades forged a strong reputation as a premier international financial centre. Contrary to traditional offshore centres, it offers the ability for treaty-based tax planning through its network of double taxation avoidance treaties (DTA). In order to benefit from the DTAs, an investment should be made by a resident of Mauritius, generally through a Global Business Category 1 (GBC1) company.

Pedro Cortés Marta Mourão On January 5 2015, the Official Gazette published Law 1/2015, which provides for the new legal regime on the system of qualifications in the fields of urban construction and urbanism. This new law will come into force on July 1 2015 and was enacted as a response to the tremendous growth that Macau SAR has been facing in the civil construction and urbanism sectors.