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The decision of the UK High Court which threw the use of Chinese walls in professional firms into doubt has been overturned. The Court of Appeal has removed the injunction from accountant KPMG which barred it from acting for the Brunei Investment Agency on an investigation into the Agency's former activities. Woolf MR, giving the judgment of the court, said that the approach to such a case should be: to determine the existence of confidential information which might harm a former client; to determine whether there was a risk of that information being disclosed; and whether the former fiduciary relationship was so strong that the court should intervene with an injunction. These issues were to be determined on the facts of each case.

Allen & Overy is gaining an office in Bangkok as a result of its merger with local firm MPS & Associates. The firm already has regional offices in Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore & Tokyo. MPS & Associates is a 18 lawyer corporate firm, working with international as well as domestic clients. It is well regarded for its banking and capital markets work. The three existing partners of MPS & Associates – Pises Sethsathira, Simon Makinson and Surapon Satimanont – will become partners in Allen & Overy on November 1.

The negotiations between Denton Hall, Richards Butler and Theodore Goddard over a possible three-way merger have been called off. The merger would have created the seventh largest law firm based in the UK, according to statistics gathered for the recently published 1999 edition of the International Financial Law Review 1000 directory. While the firms found they had a very good fit in London, that situation was not reflected overseas. Although the press release mentions "difficulties in merging the Hong Kong offices of Denton Hall and Richards Butler", sources close to the talks indicate that it proved impossible to reconcile the Asian aims of Denton Hall with the independence insisted on by the Hong Kong office of Richards Butler.

Globalization has finally hit legal services with a series of cross-border mergers and alliances in 1998. Paul Lee analyzes this year’s gathering of statistics on the world’s 50 largest law firms – the IFLR 50 – and identifies the firms spearheading international growth

Under a government decree (finance ministry, April 13 1998) a commission has been created to prepare a report on the status of Portuguese international tax laws. The report will:

The long-awaited promulgation of the new Chinese Contract Law approaches. On September 7 1998, the People's Daily published the draft of a Contract Law containing 441 articles, another step towards unification of domestic and foreign-related legislation in China. The draft contains general provisions on formation, validity, performance and termination of contracts, as well as special provisions on certain types of contracts (eg sales contracts, loan contracts, lease and financial lease contracts, construction contracts and transportation contracts).

In a highly significant case under the US bankruptcy laws, Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation v Simon [9th Cir 1998], the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that a foreign creditor may not bring a foreign collection proceeding against a debtor that has obtained a discharge under the bankruptcy law. In so doing, the Ninth Circuit has affirmed the extraterritorial effect of the US Bankruptcy Code.

US law firm White & Case and Dutch firm De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek have advised Royal Ahold on its US$2.3 billion global offering. The offering involved listings on the Dutch AEX Stock Exchange, the Swiss Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange. The transaction included 51,750,000 shares, also issued as American Depositary Receipts (ADRs), and Fls 1.495 billion (US$817 million) convertible subordinated notes due 2003, also issued in the form of ADRs. It was one of the first offerings into the US to take account of the euro due to the maturity of the convertible notes being reached in 2003. The offering is intended to help finance the recent purchase by Ahold of Giant Food.

French firm Gide Loyrette Nouel is to lose four lawyers to the Linklaters & Paines Paris office. The lawyers are part of Gide's mergers and acquisitions and litigation team. Their arrivals will double Linklaters' total of corporate partners, bringing it up to eight. Gide partners Thierry Vassogne, Marc Loy and Olivier Diaz and senior associate Arnaud de la Cotardiere will all become partners at Linklaters, with Vassogne becoming co-head of the Paris office alongside Jean-Marc Lefevre. Vassogne, a high profile litigator will no doubt be missed by the firm, despite what Xavier de Roux, Gide Loyrette Nouel partner describes as "conflicts of interests and difficulties between partners" in the firm's M&A department. He says: "Thierry Vassogne has been with the firm for twenty years and of course we all like him, but our M&A department has more than fourteen partners, and this is something which happens in law firms. We have had seven partners leave in thirty years."

Australian firm Allens Arthur Robinson has opened a new office in the Lujiazui Pudong New District of Shanghai. It is the first international firm to move into Shanghai's new financial district, and the first Australian firm to be granted a licence in Shanghai. The office will initially be staffed by five lawyers. Linklaters & Alliance is hot on their heels. Its Pudong office will officially open on October 9. Linklaters' new office will have 3 lawyers and 4 other fee earners with PRC lawyer Ming Zu its senior representative in Pudong along with partner Zili Shao, who was recruited from Allens Arthur Robinson in July, to head Linklaters' China practice.