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Herbert Smith advised lead manager Royal Bank of Scotland and trustee Citicorp on the £251 million ($351 million) mixed asset securitization for UK retail lender and insurer Paragon. The securitization involved combing loan and second mortgage principal and income payments into a single issue. Finance partner Jane Borrows led the Herbert Smith team, which also included derivatives specialist Dina Abagli, tax specialist Bradley Phillips and property partner James Barnes. Slaughter and May partner Chris Smith advised Paragon with Scottish firm Tods Murray and Northern Ireland firm L'Estrange & Brett advising on Scottish and Northern Irish law respectively.

Amarchand & Mangaldas & Suresh A Shroff & Co has negotiated the biggest deal in Indian corporate history. The firm's client was a mobile phone company owned by the two Indian business houses, Birla and Tata, and US telecoms company AT&T. The deal got underway when Birla-AT&T Tata company accepted a merger proposal from BPL, a mobile phone company controlled by Rajeev Chandrashekar, an Indian tycoon. That was in September 2000. Amarchand negotiated the deal directly with BPL and nine months later the three business houses, and AT&T, agreed to a merger valued at $2.1 billion.

Sidley, Austin, Brown & Wood has closed Asia's first whole-business securitization, using Malaysia's UK-style insolvency and security laws to structure a deal robust enough to satisfy the rating agencies. The $250 million floating rate secured note benchmark deal, arranged by Nomura International for 1st Silicon, a new silicon water fabrication plant in Sarawak, has created the potential to use whole-business legal technology elsewhere in the region.

Linklaters in Brazilian joint venture

"It's ludicrous that Europe can agree a single currency but cannot agree a common takeover law"

BBLP, Europe's continental alliance of European law firms, was in danger of breaking up last month after a further four partners resigned from the group's German member firm Beiten Burkhart Mittel & Wegener (BBMW). Coming barely a month after the defection of all but one of the firm's Frankfurt-based partners, the resignations have forced BBMW to accelerate its search for a UK partner and plug the gap in the alliance's European coverage. Mergers and acquisitions partner Christian von Sydow has been moved from the firm's Munich office to Frankfurt. BBMW is reported to be in merger negotiations with the UK firm Simmons & Simmons, but both Simmons and BBMW have so far refused to comment. However, Martin Aman, managing partner of BBLP's Swiss member firm Meyer Lustenberger, said in July that his firm had been informed of merger talks between the German and UK firms, although he refused to comment further.

Richard Walker, director of enforcement for the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), has quit the regulator after 10 years of service in another blow to the Commission's recruitment needs. Walker's decision to leave the regulator for more lucrative rewards in industry mirrors increasingly frequent moves by the SEC's lawyers, accountants and examiners. Acting SEC chairman Laura Unger has been reported as stating that high-level departures at the watchdog have created a "staffing crisis".

Regulation No. 13086 of April 18 2001 of the Commissione Nazionale delle Società e della Borsa (CONSOB) has amended Regulation No. 11971 of May 14 1999. The aim of the amendment is to provide an alternative instrument for listing admissions of programmes for covered warrants with the clear benefit of simplifying listing procedures.

In December 2000, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Social and Health Affairs appointed a working group to prepare legislative amendments that could be implemented urgently. The report of the working group was delivered to the two ministries in June 2001. Under the existing provisions, the supervisory duty divided between the Finnish Financial Supervision Authority (FSA) and the Finnish Insurance Supervision Authority (ISA) is not clearly determined. It is possible that newly created banking and insurance groups could operate in the Finnish market without belonging to the area of responsibility of either of the above supervisory authorities.

Weil, Gotshal & Manges has closed the first Irish mortgage securitization deal of the year. The euro650 million ($320 million) issue of AAA and A2-rated notes by Phoenix Funding and backed by the Irish residential mortgages held by IIB Homeloans, is the first time that the IIB Bank subsidiary has tapped the securitization market in six years.