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Howard Trust has resigned as group general counsel and group secretary of Barclays, forcing the bank to find a replacement before he leaves in the first quarter of 2003. Trust became Barclays' first general counsel in 1995 after joining six years earlier, but has decided he wants to pursue new opportunities.

Dechert has opened a full-service office in Frankfurt, Germany, run by the former managing partner of Simmons & Simmons' German operations. Corporate finance specialist Gerhard Kaiser has become the new managing partner of Dechert in Germany. He will start in his new role by building the firm's German-law focus on private equity, corporate recovery, taxation and investment management work, with an aim to have 12 lawyers on the ground by the end of this year.

Share repurchasing has been employed as an instrument of financial policy by German stock corporations since a reform of the German Stock Corporation Act in 1998. It essentially requires the shareholders' meeting to authorize the management board to repurchase shares up to a total volume of 10% of the share capital for a period of 18 months. Furthermore, the shareholders' meeting fixes the highest and lowest price for the shares to be acquired but it is at liberty not to specify the purpose of the share repurchase. The share repurchase can serve various objectives: procurement of shares as acquisition currency, distribution of excess liquidity with unchanged dividend level, increase of income per individual share and, not least, giving positive signals to the capital markets.

Lukoil has proved that a Russian company can cope with international standards of disclosure by becoming the first Russian issuer to successfully list on the London Stock Exchange (LSE). The Russian government postponed the privatization of 5.9% of its stake, citing poor market conditions, but the company went ahead with the London listing.

South Korea's competition watchdog has said some of the country's largest companies could have to sell shareholdings worth $2.9 billion or risk losing their voting rights on the stakes. The Fair Trade Commission has accused the Korean conglomerates (chaebols) of violating Korean laws aimed at limiting the size of companies.

By Michael Evans

David Deck of Shearman & Sterling on why the peculiarities of Japan’s rent laws make real estate-backed deals tricky

US-style exchange offers are catching on in the Eurobond market. James Cole of Shearman & Sterling explains how they are carried out

The City Council of Bogotá has issued Act 65 of 2002 (Acuerdo 65 de 2002) by means of which it has passed an industry and commerce tax reform. The Act includes reforms related to taxpayers, taxable base, tax withholdings, and an increase in the applicable rates that had been proposed by the city mayor since last year. The most relevant aspects of the reform are outlined below.

Clifford Chance has advised France Telecom on the latest part of its disposal programme, which has seen the company selling its transmission tower business Télédiffusion de France (TDF) to a private equity consortium for €1.9 billion ($1.8 billion). Ashurst Morris Crisp advised the consortium, which consists of Charterhouse Development Capital, CDC Ixis Equity Capital and Caisse des Dépôts, the French bank. Clifford Chance advised France Telecom and White & Case and Linklaters advised the banks.