Emerging markets

Katten Muchin Rosenman hired five structured finance lawyers from Dewey & LeBoeuf, including five structured finance partners in New York and a financial products tax partner in Washington, D.C.

Petroleos de Brasil has a hold on high finance players that at times seems to border on the hypnotic. ABS players have also been loath to look away as the company waves its epic $224-billion investment plan in their faces.

The so-called foreclosure scandal has grabbed headlines over the past month. ASR's November issue looks beyond the mainstream coverage to its effect on bondholders.

Profiting from a relationship with behemoth Petroleos de Brasil, Brazil’s Odebrecht Oleo e Gas is tapping the structured finance for a whopping $1.5 billion. Santander and HSBC are reportedly arranging the deal. Neither bank returned requests for comment.

SNR Denton has hired Ricardo Martinez as a partner in its capital markets group. Martinez, who joins SNR Denton from Allen & Overy, will reside in the New York office.

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System issued a report yesterday on the potential effect of credit risk retention requirements on securitization.

The Brazilian Finance Ministry’s recent hike of the IOF tax on foreign investment into fixed income investments to 6% from 4% is bound to have some kind of impact on the appetite of overseas money for local securitization products. The increase comes after a 2 percentage point hike earlier this month.

Fitch Ratings announced that Marjan van der Weijden will lead the agency's EMEA structured finance group. She will report to Ian Linnell, global head of structured finance for Fitch.

Numerix hired John Peck as head of sales for the EMEA region. Peck, who will be based in Numerix’s London office, was previously at Quantifi where he was responsible for establishing and running its EMEA operations.

Bingham expanded its Hong Kong office by adding three partners namely, Laurence Isaacson, Vincent Sum and Mark Fucci.

The urge to unwrap is pretty strong these days. On both the originating and investing sides of the bench, players are itching to ditch the monoline guarantees that no longer add value.

With the government nearly monopolizing mortgage origination, players are asking themselves: How do private companies create "affordability" products for non-prime borrowers and do so by funding themselves through a viable ABS market?

BTIG, a broker-dealer partly owned by Goldman Sachs, is pushing into new markets by helping fixed-income investors buy and sell securities in developing countries, which some observers say have matured and now more closely resemble their trading partners in the Group of 7.

Turkey’s Vakifbank has completed an exchange offer to strip the wraps off tranches in its program backed by diversified payment rights (DPRs). Overall, the bank exchanged nearly 72% of the volume of the tranches on offer, with a Radian-covered tranche the only one to be retired in full. Some $549 million was offered and $394 million exchanged. Full results are attached. Standard Bank handled the deal.

Thanks to a pick-up in cash flows, an $100 million 2006-A tranche backed by diversified payment rights (DPRs) from Kazakhstan's Alliance Bank fully paid down this week, said a source at the Asian Development Bank (ADB), which wrapped the piece.

Macquarie Group said it acquired 100% of the membership interests in Presidio Partners, a real estate private capital raising and advisory company based in the U.S.

Structured finance attorney Laurence Pettit has moved as a partner to Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel from Baker & McKenzie. In the ABS realm, Pettit has worked on private student loans, life settlements, structured settlements, diversified payment rights, consumer loans and trade receivables. His CV extends beyond the U.S., with deals backed by assets from Russia, Turkey, the UK, and Japan.

Structured finance attorney Laurence Pettit has moved as a partner to Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel from Baker & McKenzie. In the ABS realm, Pettit has worked on private student loans, life settlements, structured settlements, diversified payment rights, consumer loans and trade receivables. His c.v. extends beyond the U.S., including deals backed by assets from Russia, Turkey, the UK, and Japan. Also hopping from Baker & McKenzie to Kramer Levin are Pettit’s colleagues Gilbert C. Liu and Richard D. Rudder, both of whom work in the structured finance space as well. The three will continue practicing in the same areas, with some nuances, such as a potentially greater focus on the commercial real-estate area, given Kramer Levin’s strengths.

In late August, an entity of the State of Mexico known as IFREM originated a roughly Ps4 billion ($306 million), 20-year deal backed by flows from property registration fees. Structured by MBIA unit LatAm Capital Advisors (LCA), the transaction was novel on a number of fronts.

In May, a water project vital to the Peruvian capital of Lima issued a securitization in the domestic market.