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Gazprom has arranged a US$3 billion loan to finance its investments in the Yamal pipeline project and to refinance a US$1.2 billion bridge loan. The eight-year facility will be secured against revenues from Gaz de France supply contracts.

On January 21 Swiss chemical group Ciba announced it is to buy UK industrial chemical maker Allied Colloids with a friendly offer of US$2.33 billion. Ciba Specialty Chemical Holding bid US$3.36 per share of Allied Colloids, knocking out rival US bidder Hercules.

The market for Brazilian sovereign debt is becoming increasingly attractive for international banks. By Walter Douglas Stuber and Adriana Maria Gödel of Amaro, Stuber e Advogados Associados, São Paulo

New York's LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae LLP has opened in Houston. It will be the firm's 19th office and its 15th in the US.

Swedish firm Hellström & Partners, Stockholm, announced on January 12 it is excluding star finance partner Peter Sederowsky from the firm. The announcement comes after Sederowsky, who has joined rival firm Setterwalls, announced in his own letters that Hellström & Partners was to cease operating.

• Dechert Price & Rhoads has won the services of Susan Ervin, former deputy director and chief counsel of trading and markets at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the US derivatives regulator. Ervin joins the firm's Washington DC office as counsel.

New York-based Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom is set to open an office in Silicon Valley, California. It will be the centre of Skadden's high technology practice as well as focusing on mergers and acquisitions and intellectual property (IP) issues, capital market transactions and litigation matters.

A number of foreign firms have left and are likely to leave Hungary, pushed out more by a change in the work on offer than by the planned amendments to the bar rules for foreign lawyers. Richard Forster reports

The development of the European asset-backed securities market took a significant step forward in October last year with the launch by Ford Credit of a highly innovative US$5billion global securitization programme. Globaldrive is the first Euro asset-backed programme to be set up by a corporate. It seeks to bring to Ford Credit's asset-backed issues the flexibility and efficiency of a medium-term note programme. The inaugural issue under the programme, an AAA rated Dm1 billion (US$550 million) floating rate issue backed by US dollar wholesale auto receivables, closed successfully on October 15 1997.

Corporate governance and insider trading rules limit the options for a target's management. Long-term planning is essential. By Philip Rogers of Arnheim & Co*, London, and Christian Altvater of Nehm & Co*, Frankfurt