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On July 25 1996 the Bank of Italy introduced a number of amendments to the Regulations enacted on May 20 1994 to implement Law No. 86/1994 on real estate closed investment funds.

Media group United News & Media, recently merged with MAI, has bought conference organizer Blenheim Group. The offer is worth about £590 million (US$970 million).

Elizabeth Wall, group director of legal services at Cable & Wireless, London, talks to Diana Bentley

P&O, the UK shipping firm, is set to merge its ocean container business with that of Dutch counterpart Royal Nedlloyd. The merged entity, P&O Nedlloyd Container Line, requires EU regulatory clearance and will have assets of US$1.5 billion.

Toronto-based Goodman Phillips & Vineberg has launched its third office in Asia, opening in Singapore in December. Goodman Phillips has had an office in Hong Kong for some 25 years and is the only Canadian firm with an office in Beijing.

The UK's Britannia Building Society has bought a £1.1 billion (US$1.8 billion) mortgage book from Citibank International. The book consists of about 30,000 residential mortgages in the UK. On the same day, Britannia issued £100 million step-up subordinated notes under its MTN programme.

US chocolate company Hershey has agreed to buy the North American confectionery business of Leaf Inc, the US subsidiary of Finland's Huhtamaki. The price is US$440 million plus annual licensing fees. Hershey has also agreed to sell Huhtamaki its two European operations, Germany's Gubor and Italy's Sperlari, for US$110 million.

British Telecom has launched a US$21 billion bid for the 80% of US telecommunications company MCI Communications which it does not already own. This is the largest ever foreign takeover of a US company. The combined company will be called Concert.

The dissolution of the international partnership between Canadian firms Ogilvy Renault and Osler Hoskin & Harcourt was coolly calculated many months in advance by Ogilvy. This much is revealed by an Ogilvy Renault internal memo dating from 1995 obtained by International Financial Law Review which discusses the future of a potential independent Ogilvy Renault office in London. The official reason given by both firms for the split in London in February 1996 was that Ogilvy Renault had announced it was to open an office in Toronto in the summer of 1996. However, the memo states that in mid-1995 Ogilvy Renault was "considering various alternatives" to its arrangements with Osler Hoskin. The memo was addressed by then managing partner of the London office, Michael Fortier (now based in Montreal), to managing partner Raymond Crevier.

The Act on bonds which came into force on August 20 1995 deals with particular types of bonds such as convertibles. Since then, no convertible bonds have been publicly offered by Polish issuers and quoted on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. However, a few convertible bond issues are now known to be in preparation. Convertible bonds need to be attractive securities to satisfy both corporate and financial needs (eg, they may serve as protection against an unexpected takeover; the public offer or private placement, as the case may be, of convertible bonds is often easier and more successful than that of standard bonds).