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After several years of restructuring and writing off bad loans, Asian banks want to raise their capital adequacy ratios by issuing hybrid tier one securities. Sanghoon Lee of Linklaters looks at the steps regulators have taken so far and considers the structural challenges that remain

The Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) is looking forward to a new era in Hong Kong's financial markets with the long-awaited Securities and Futures Ordinance (SFO) due to come into effect on April 1 2003.

Belgium's lawmakers are hoping to learn from the mistakes of the US and their European peers and bring legal certainty to the supervision of markets and the behaviour of listed companies.

The Shoura Council, a highly influential consultative group made up of some of the leading Saudi Arabian nationals, has rejected a proposed 10% income tax on foreign individuals. While, Saudi Arabia levies corporate taxes, it has traditionally not levied an individual income tax on expatriate workers. However, the country was considering levying a tax on expatriates as a means of reducing public debt and reducing the number of foreign workers in the hope that unemployed Saudi Arabian nationals would replace them.

The understandable haste of Asian governments to create insolvency frameworks to revitalize their post-1997 economies has created as many problems as it has solved. Robert Zafft of the OECD and Lampros Vassiliou of Allens Arthur Robinson explain

In a significant development for Georgian tax legislation, the president of Georgia on April 19 2002 approved instructions outlining detailed procedures for the registration of taxpayers and the maintenance of a tax registry at district, zonal and regional levels (Decree 155). The instructions include forms to be filled out at the time of registration, reorganization or liquidation, and call for the collection of extensive information on taxpayers.

In December, Time magazine ran an article called the Must Lunch List, profiling 10 of the most powerful behind-the-scenes actors in Europe's increasingly integrated economy. One of the 10 was Jaap Winter, the former legal adviser to Unilever and leading corporate governance specialist who chairs the EU's High Level Group of Company Law Experts.

Milbank acts on record deal for Indonesia

The first part of the UK's largest-ever public-private partnership (PPP) transaction, the controversial transfer of responsibility for the London Underground to private companies, has closed.

Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld and London law firm Herbert Smith will have helped to close the largest corporate deal in Russia if the Azerbaijani government agrees to the $1.4 billion sale of Lukoil's stake in one of the country's large oil fields.