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US/UK automotive parts supplier LucasVarity is selling its VarityPerkins Engines business to US rival Caterpillar for US$1.3 billion. While the deal surprised some analysts, who viewed Perkins as an essential part of LucasVarity, the acquisition is seen as a good strategic fit for Caterpillar.

UK firm Allen & Overy announced that it is to merge with 65-lawyer Italian firm Brosio, Casati e Associati. Meanwhile, Haarmann Hemmelrath & Partner has become the second German firm to open an office in Italy. In the last year the following foreign firms have all opened in Italy or added to an existing presence: Clifford Chance, Freshfields, Simmons & Simmons and Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton.

China's new foreign loans regime bars non-profitable companies from seeking international finance, and also limits the profitable ones. Worries about the Asian crisis have ensured caution. By Guanxi Zheng of Stikeman, Elliott, Hong Kong

Despite turbulence on the markets, Malaysia's investment-led infrastructure development programme looks quite promising. By Winston Bernard Silva, advocate and solicitor, Singapore

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.

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.

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

Linklaters & Paines and Sullivan & Cromwell have again risen to the top in a hectic year. Cravath Swaine & Moore and Davis Polk & Wardwell share the Yankee title. Nick Ferguson and Barbara Galli report

Quebec has moved to drop the requirement that prospectuses must be published in French, as well as other discouragements to foreign issuers. By Andrew Fleming of Ogilvy Renault, London